“I trust your uncle is well,” Mrs. Clarke observed.
It was in that moment Trent got his inspiration.
“I’m afraid he is very ill,” he said sadly, “at his age—he must be almost ninety——”
“Only eighty-four,” Mrs. Clarke reminded him. She remembered the year of his emigration.
“Eighty-four is a great age to attain,” he declared, “and he has lived not wisely but well. I feel I should go out and see if there’s anything I can do.”
“You are going to leave us?” gasped Mrs. Sauer. His going would deprive her of a most satisfactory lodger.
“I’m afraid my duty is plain,” he returned gravely.
Thus he left Mrs. Sauer’s establishment. Years later he wondered whether if he had enjoyed better cooking he would have fallen from grace, and if he could not with justice blame a New England boiled dinner for his lapse.
For a few days he stayed at a quiet hotel. He wanted a small apartment on Central Park. There were reasons for this. First, he must live alone in a house where no officious elevator boys observed his going and his coming. Central Park West offered many such houses. And if it should happen that he ever had to flee from the pursuit of those who guarded the mansions that faced him on the park’s eastern side, there was no safer way home than across the silent grass. He was one of those New Yorkers who know their Central Park. There had been a season when a friend gave him the use of a saddle horse and there was no bridle path that he did not know.
He was fortunate in finding rooms at the top of a fine old brownstone house in the eighties. There were four large rooms all overlooking the Park. That he was compelled to climb five flights of stairs was no objection in his eyes. A little door to the left of his own entrance gave admission to a ladder leading to the roof. None of the other tenants, so the agent informed him, ever used it. Anthony Trent was relieved to hear it.