One wintry afternoon Lane did not wander round as long as usual, for the reason that his endurance was lessening.  He returned early to his new quarters, and in the dim hallway he passed a slight pale girl who looked at him.  She seemed familiar, but Lane could not place her.  Evidently she had a room in the building.  Lane hated the big barn-like house, and especially the bare cold room where he had to seek rest.  Of late he had not eaten any dinner.  He usually remained in bed as long as he could, and made a midday meal answer all requirements.  Appetite, like many other things, was failing him.  This day he sat upon his bed, in the abstraction of the lonely and unhappy, until the cold forced him to get under the covers.

His weary eyelids had just closed when he was awakened.  The confused sense of being torn from slumber gave way to a perception of a voice in the room next to his.  It was a man’s voice, rough with the huskiness Lane recognized as peculiar to drunkards.  And the reply to it seemed to be a low-toned appeal from a woman.

“Playin’ off sick, eh?  You don’t want to work.  But you’ll get me some money, girl, d’ye hear?”

A door slammed, rattling the thin partition between the two rooms, and heavy footsteps dragged in the hall and on the stairway.

Sleep refused to come back to Lane.  As he lay there he was surprised at the many sounds he heard.  The ramshackle old structure, which he had supposed almost vacant, was busy with life.  Stealthy footfalls in the hallways passed and repassed; a piano drummed somewhere; a man’s loud voice rang out, and a woman’s laugh faint, hollow and far away, like the ghost of laughter, returned in echo.  The musical clinking of glasses, the ring of a cash register, the rattling click of pool balls, came up from below.

Presently Lane remembered the nature of the place.  It was a house of night.  In daylight it was silent; its inmates were asleep.  But as the darkness unfolded a cloak over it, all the hidden springs of its obscure humanity began to flow.  Lying there with the woman’s appeal haunting him and all those sounds in his ears he thought of their meaning.  The drunkard with his lust for money; his moaning victim; the discordant piano; the man with the vacant laugh; the lost hope and youth in the woman’s that echoed it; the stealing, slipping feet of those who must tread softly—­all conveyed to Lane that he had awakened in another world, a world which shunned sunlight.

Toward morning he dozed off into a fitful sleep which lasted until ten o’clock when he arose and dressed.  As he was about to go out a knock on the door of the room next to his recalled the incident of the night.  He listened.  Another knock followed, somewhat louder, but no response came from within.

“Say, you in there,” cried a voice Lane recognized as the landlady’s.  She rattled the door-knob.

A girl’s voice answered weakly:  “Come in.”