To the mind of the Cape man, used as he was to the open spaces of both sea and land, these dingy blocks of brick houses, three and four stories in height, all quite alike in smoke and squalor and even in the pattern of the net curtains at their parlor windows, made as dreary a picture as he had ever imagined.  He thought of that pale, slender, violet-eyed girl coming back to this ugly block at night, after long hours at the restaurant, having to look forward to nothing more beautiful, in all probability, inside the house where she lodged.  Who would not be glad, overjoyed, indeed, to get away from such an environment?

He found the number.  The house was no worse and no better than its neighbors.  By stains on the blistered bricks beside the door frame he gathered that scraps of paper advertising empty rooms had often been pasted there.  He rang the bell at the top of the rail-guarded steps.  After a time he rang again.

He could hear the bell jangle somewhere in a distant part of the house.  Nobody came in answer to his summons, not even after his third ring.  At length the creaking, iron-barred gate in the area warned him that the main door at which he rang was not in use at that hour of the day.  A woman in a house dress as ugly as the street itself, and with untidy gray hair and a bar of smut on her cheek, craned her neck from this opening to look up at him.

“There’s no use your ringing.  I ain’t got an empty room, young man,” she announced.

He descended spryly into the area before she could close the gate.  Her near-sighted scowl misjudged him again, for she added: 

“Nor I don’t want to buy anything.”

“One moment, ma’am,” he cried.  “I have nothing for sale.  I’d like to see somebody who lodges here.”

“Who?” asked the woman, peering at him curiously.

“Miss Bostwick.”

“You’ll have to come this evening.”

“Oh!  She has—­has gone to work already?”

“My stars!  Do you know what time it is, young man?” demanded the lodging-house keeper.  “It’s after ten o’clock.”

Already Tunis Latham’s hopes began to sink.

“Then—­then she goes to work early?”

“Lemme tell you, them that works for Hoskin & Marl have to show up by eight or they lose their jobs.”

“And she will not be in until evening?” he repeated.

“’Bout seven.  She gets her supper before she comes home.  I don’t give meals.”

“Where is this place she works at?” asked the captain of the Seamew, with a suppressed sigh.

“Guess you are a stranger in town, aren’t you?” said the curious landlady.  “I thought everybody knew Hoskin & Marl’s.  It’s on Tremont Street.  The big department store.”

“Oh!  Miss Bostwick works there?”

“In the laces.  You can’t know her very well, young man.”

“I come from her folks down on the Cape,” he thought it his duty to explain.  “I’ve a message for her.”