But another circumstance touched him more delicately; his room was arranged with greater care than before, and with an occasional exhibition of taste that certainly had not distinguished Mrs. Roberts’s previous ministrations.  One evening on his return he found a small bouquet of inexpensive flowers in a glass on his writing-table.  He loved flowers too well not to detect that they were quite fresh, and could have been put there only an hour or two before he arrived.

The next evening was Saturday, and, as he usually left the office earlier on that day, it occurred to him, as he walked home, that it was about the time his fair neighbor would be leaving the theatre, and that it was possible he might meet her.

At the front door, however, he found Roberts, who returned his greeting with a certain awkwardness which struck him as singular.  When he reached the niche on the landing he found his candle was gone, but he proceeded on, groping his way up the stairs, with an odd conviction that both these incidents pointed to the fact that the woman had just returned or was expected.

He had also a strange feeling—­which may have been owing to the darkness—­that some one was hidden on the landing or on the stairs where he would pass.  This was further accented by a faint odor of patchouli, as, with his hand on the rail, he turned the corner of the third landing, and he was convinced that if he had put out his other hand it would have come in contact with his mysterious neighbor.  But a certain instinct of respect for her secret, which she was even now guarding in the darkness, withheld him, and he passed on quickly to his own floor.

Here it was lighter; the moon shot a beam of silver across the passage from an unshuttered window as he passed.  He reached his room door, entered, but instead of lighting the gas and shutting the door, stood with it half open, listening in the darkness.

His suspicions were verified; there was a slight rustling noise, and a figure which had evidently followed him appeared at the end of the passage.  It was that of a woman habited in a grayish dress and cloak of the same color; but as she passed across the band of moonlight he had a distinct view of her anxious, worried face.  It was a face no longer young; it was worn with illness, but still replete with a delicacy and faded beauty so inconsistent with her avowed profession that he felt a sudden pang of pain and doubt.  The next moment she had vanished in her room, leaving the same faint perfume behind her.  He closed his door softly, lit the gas, and sat down in a state of perplexity.  That swift glimpse of her face and figure had made her story improbable to the point of absurdity, or possibly to the extreme of pathos!

It seemed incredible that a woman of that quality should be forced to accept a vocation at once so low, so distasteful, and so unremunerative.  With her evident antecedents, had she no friends but this common Western night watchman of a bank?  Had Roberts deceived him?  Was his whole story a fabrication, and was there some complicity between the two?  What was it?  He knit his brows.