The wash-stand was pulled out.  The sheets of Mr. Ladley’s manuscript, usually an orderly pile, were half on the floor.  The bed coverings had been jerked off and flung over the back of a chair.

Peter, imprisoned, might have moved the wash-stand and upset the manuscript—­Peter had never put the bed-clothing over the chair, or broken his own leg.

“Humph!” he said, and getting out his note-book, he made an exact memorandum of what I had told him, and of the condition of the room.  That done, he turned to me.

“Mrs. Pitman,” he said, “I’ll thank you to call me Mr. Ladley for the next day or so.  I am an actor out of employment, forty-one years of age, short, stout, and bald, married to a woman I would like to be quit of, and I am writing myself a play in which the Shuberts intend to star me, or in which I intend the Shuberts to star me.”

“Very well, Mr. Ladley,” I said, trying to enter into the spirit of the thing, and, God knows, seeing no humor in it.  “Then you’ll like your soda from the ice-box?”

“Soda?  For what?”

“For your whisky and soda, before you go to bed, sir.”

“Oh, certainly, yes.  Bring the soda.  And—­just a moment, Mrs. Pitman:  Mr. Holcombe is a total abstainer, and has always been so.  It is Ladley, not Holcombe, who takes this abominable stuff.”

I said I quite understood, but that Mr. Ladley could skip a night, if he so wished.  But the little gentleman would not hear to it, and when I brought the soda, poured himself a double portion.  He stood looking at it, with his face screwed up, as if the very odor revolted him.

“The chances are,” he said, “that Ladley—­that I—­having a nasty piece of work to do during the night, would—­will take a larger drink than usual.”  He raised the glass, only to put it down.  “Don’t forget,” he said, “to put a large knife where you left the one last night.  I’m sorry the water has gone down, but I shall imagine it still at the seventh step.  Good night, Mrs. Pitman.”

“Good night, Mr. Ladley,” I said, smiling, “and remember, you are three weeks in arrears with your board.”

His eyes twinkled through his spectacles.  “I shall imagine it paid,” he said.

I went out, and I heard him close the door behind me.  Then, through the door, I heard a great sputtering and coughing, and I knew he had got the whisky down somehow.  I put the knife out, as he had asked me to, and went to bed.  I was ready to drop.  Not even the knowledge that an imaginary Mr. Ladley was about to commit an imaginary crime in the house that night could keep me awake.

Mr. Reynolds came in at eleven o’clock.  I was roused when he banged his door.  That was all I knew until morning.  The sun on my face wakened me.  Peter, in his basket, lifted his head as I moved, and thumped his tail against his pillow in greeting.  I put on a wrapper, and called Mr. Reynolds by knocking at his door.  Then I went on to the front room.  The door was closed, and some one beyond was groaning.  My heart stood still, and then raced on.  I opened the door and looked in.