“Yes,” he answered.
“I have the bill ready.”... She called the servant who came with the broom. “On my table among the papers you will find Mr. Bellair’s bill for storage. Please get it.”
Bellair heard the servant on the stairs, one, two, three flights; then a long silence. He had never been quite sure where the landlady slept, believing that she hovered from basement to sky-light according to the ebb and flow of the tenant tides. The double-doors from the hall to the lower front room were slightly ajar. This, the most expensive in the house, appeared to be vacant. The servant was gone a long time. The landlady did not leave him alone in the hall. They did not speak. The darkness crept upon Bellair as if he were in a tank that was slowly but surely being filled, and presently would cover him. The paper was brought, the charge for six months’ storage, meagre. Bellair paid it, and offered more. He thought of her hard life, but the extra money was passed back to him.
“I have that present in keeping,” she said.
“What present?”
“That you gave me the night you went away——”
“But I gave it to you. Would you not take a little gift from one who had been in your house five years?”
“Money easily got, goes the same,” she answered.
Then Bellair realised how stupid he had been. She had seen the newspapers. She had been afraid to trust him alone in that bare hall. The smell of carpets stifled him.
“I’m sorry you feel that way,” he said. “But hold the present a little longer. Perhaps you will not always feel that it came so easily. I’ll send for my goods at once.... Good-bye.”