“That’s all very well,” Mrs. Ladley said.  I could always hear her, she having a theatrical sort of voice—­one that carries.  “But what about the prying she-devil that runs the house?”

“Hush, for God’s sake!” broke in Mr. Ladley, and after that they spoke in whispers.  Even with my ear against the panel, I could not catch a word.

The men came just then to move the piano, and by the time we had taken it and the furniture up-stairs, the water was over the kitchen floor, and creeping forward into the hall.  I had never seen the river come up so fast.  By noon the yard was full of floating ice, and at three that afternoon the police skiff was on the front street, and I was wading around in rubber boots, taking the pictures off the walls.

I was too busy to see who the Ladleys’ visitor was, and he had gone when I remembered him again.  The Ladleys took the second-story front, which was empty, and Mr. Reynolds, who was in the silk department in a store across the river, had the room just behind.

I put up a coal stove in a back room next the bathroom, and managed to cook the dinner there.  I was washing up the dishes when Mr. Reynolds came in.  As it was Sunday, he was in his slippers and had the colored supplement of a morning paper in his hand.

“What’s the matter with the Ladleys?” he asked.  “I can’t read for their quarreling.”

“Booze, probably,” I said.  “When you’ve lived in the flood district as long as I have, Mr. Reynolds, you’ll know that the rising of the river is a signal for every man in the vicinity to stop work and get full.  The fuller the river, the fuller the male population.”

“Then this flood will likely make ’em drink themselves to death!” he said.  “It’s a lulu.”

“It’s the neighborhood’s annual debauch.  The women are busy keeping the babies from getting drowned in the cellars, or they’d get full, too.  I hope, since it’s come this far, it will come farther, so the landlord will have to paper the parlor.”

That was at three o’clock.  At four Mr. Ladley went down the stairs, and I heard him getting into a skiff in the lower hall.  There were boats going back and forth all the time, carrying crowds of curious people, and taking the flood sufferers to the corner grocery, where they were lowering groceries in a basket on a rope from an upper window.

I had been making tea when I heard Mr. Ladley go out.  I fixed a tray with a cup of it and some crackers, and took it to their door.  I had never liked Mrs. Ladley, but it was chilly in the house with the gas shut off and the lower floor full of ice-water.  And it is hard enough to keep boarders in the flood district.

She did not answer to my knock, so I opened the door and went in.  She was at the window, looking after him, and the brown valise, that figured in the case later, was opened on the floor.  Over the foot of the bed was the black and white dress, with the red collar.