Then the carriage stopped before a dingy house in a row that had once belonged to a very fashionable quarter, but that was long ago. Boarding houses they were now, and their class was about number three.
“It is a horrible place to bring you to, Miss Rivers,” confessed her guide; “and I am really glad Miss Seldon did not accompany you, for she never would have forgiven either of us. But I knew you would not be afraid.”
“No, I am not afraid. But, oh, why don’t they hurry?”
He had to ring the bell the second time ere any one came to the door. Then, as the harsh jangle died away, steps were heard descending the stairs, and a man without a coat and with a pipe in his mouth, shot back the bolt with much grumbling. 330
“I’ll cut the blasted wire if some one in the shebang don’t tend to this door better,” he growled to a lady with a mug of beer, who just then emerged from the lower regions. “Me a-trying to get the lines of that new afterpiece in my head—chock-full of business, too!—and that bell clanging forever right under my room. I’ll move!”
“I wish you would,” remarked Harvey, when the door opened at last. “Move a little faster when you do condescend to open the door. Come, Miss Rivers—up this way.”
And the lady of the beer mug and the gentleman of the pipe stared at each other, and at the white vision of girlhood going up the dark, bad-smelling stairway.
“Well, that’s a new sort in this castle,” remarked the man. “Do you guess the riddle of it?”
The woman did not answer, but listened to the footsteps as they went along the hall. Then a door opened and shut.
“They’ve gone to Goldie’s room,” she said. “That’s queer. Goldie ain’t the sort to have very high-toned friends, so it can’t be a long-lost sister,” and she smiled contemptuously.