Dear Mr. Blake (read the letter):  It was nice to get your note and to know that you are back in town so soon.  Of course you must come to see me.  I want Aunt Paula to know that all the complimentary things I have said about you are true.  We are never at home in the conventional sense—­but I hope Wednesday evening will do.

    Cordially,

    ANNETTE MARKHAM.

He had greeted this little note with all the private follies of lovers.  Now for the hundredth time, he studied it for significances, signs, pretty intimacies; and he found positively nothing about it which he did not like.  True, he failed to extract any important information from the name of the stationer, which he found under the flap of the envelope; but on the other hand the paper itself distinctly pleased him.  It was note-size and of a thick, unfeminine quality.  He approved of the writing—­small, fine, legible, without trace of seminary affectation.  And his spirits actually rose when he observed that it bore no coat-of-arms—­not even a monogram.

At last, with more flourishes of folly, he put the note away in his desk and inspected himself in the glass.  To the credit of his modesty, he was thinking not of his white tie—­fifth that he had ruined in the process of dressing—­nor yet of the set of his coat.  He was thinking of Mrs. Paula Markham and the impression which these gauds and graces might make upon her.

“What do you suppose she’s like?” he asked inaudibly of the correct vision in the glass.

He had exhausted all the possibilities—­a fat, pretentious medium whom Annette’s mind transformed by the alchemy of old affection into a presentable personage; a masculine and severe old woman with the “spook” look in her eyes; a fluttering, affected precieuse, concealing her quackery by chatter.  Gradually as he thought on her, the second of these hypotheses came to govern—­he saw her as the severe and masculine type.  This being so, what tack should she take?

The correct vision in the glass vouchsafed no answer to this.  His mood persisted as his taxicab whirled him into the region which borders the western edge of Central Park.  The thing assumed the proportions of a great adventure.  No old preparation for battle, no old packings to break into the unknown dark, had ever given him quite such a sense of the high, free airs where romance blows.  He was going on a mere conventional call; but he was going also to high and thrilling possibilities.

The house was like a thousand other houses of the prosperous middle class, distinguishable only by minor differences of doors and steps and area rails, from twenty others on the same block.  He found himself making mystery even of this.  Separate houses in New York require incomes.

“Evidently it pays to deal in spooks,” he said to himself.