“I wouldn’t have believed it.”

“Believed what?” inquired Martha Foote, pleasantly.

“That there was anybody left in the world who could look like that in a white shirtwaist at 6:30 A.M.  Is that all your own hair?”

“Strictly.”

“Some people have all the luck,” sighed Geisha McCoy, and dropped listlessly back on her pillows.  Martha Foote came forward into the room.  At that instant the woman in the bed sat up again, tense, every nerve strained in an attitude of listening.  The mulatto girl had come swiftly to the foot of the bed and was clutching the footboard, her knuckles showing white.

“Listen!” A hissing whisper from the haggard woman in the bed.  “What’s that?”

“Wha’ dat!” breathed the coloured girl, all her elegance gone, her every look and motion a hundred-year throwback to her voodoo-haunted ancestors.

The three women remained rigid, listening.  From the wall somewhere behind the bed came a low, weird monotonous sound, half wail, half croaking moan, like a banshee with a cold.  A clanking, then, as of chains.  A s-s-swish.  Then three dull raps, seemingly from within the very wall itself.

The coloured girl was trembling.  Her lips were moving, soundlessly.  But Geisha McCoy’s emotion was made of different stuff.

“Now look here,” she said, desperately, “I don’t mind a sleepless night.  I’m used to ’em.  But usually I can drop off at five, for a little while.  And that’s been going on—­well, I don’t know how long.  It’s driving me crazy.  Blanche, you fool, stop that hand wringing!  I tell you there’s no such thing as ghosts.  Now you”—­she turned to Martha Foote again—­“you tell me, for God’s sake, what is that!”

And into Martha Foote’s face there came such a look of mingled compassion and mirth as to bring a quick flame of fury into Geisha McCoy’s eyes.

“Look here, you may think it’s funny but—­”

“I don’t.  I don’t.  Wait a minute.”  Martha Foote turned and was gone.  An instant later the weird sounds ceased.  The two women in the room looked toward the door, expectantly.  And through it came Martha Foote, smiling.  She turned and beckoned to some one without.  “Come on,” she said.  “Come on.”  She put out a hand, encouragingly, and brought forward the shrinking, cowering, timorous figure of Anna Czarnik, scrub-woman on the sixth floor.  Her hand still on her shoulder Martha Foote led her to the centre of the room, where she stood, gazing dumbly about.  She was the scrub-woman you’ve seen in every hotel from San Francisco to Scituate.  A shapeless, moist, blue calico mass.  Her shoes turned up ludicrously at the toes, as do the shoes of one who crawls her way backward, crab-like, on hands and knees.  Her hands were the shrivelled, unlovely members that bespeak long and daily immersion in dirty water.  But even had these invariable marks of her trade been lacking, you could not have failed to recognise her type by the large and glittering mock-diamond comb which failed to catch up her dank and stringy hair in the back.