The young man followed her up the stairs.  A faint light from no particular source mitigated the shadows of the halls.  They trod noiselessly upon a stair carpet that its own loom would have forsworn.  It seemed to have become vegetable; to have degenerated in that rank, sunless air to lush lichen or spreading moss that grew in patches to the staircase and was viscid under the foot like organic matter.  At each turn of the stairs were vacant niches in the wall.  Perhaps plants had once been set within them.  If so they had died in that foul and tainted air.  It may be that statues of the saints had stood there, but it was not difficult to conceive that imps and devils had dragged them forth in the darkness and down to the unholy depths of some furnished pit below.

“This is the room,” said the housekeeper, from her furry throat.  “It’s a nice room.  It ain’t often vacant.  I had some most elegant people in it last summer—­no trouble at all, and paid in advance to the minute.  The water’s at the end of the hall.  Sprowls and Mooney kept it three months.  They done a vaudeville sketch.  Miss B’retta Sprowls—­you may have heard of her—­Oh, that was just the stage names—­right there over the dresser is where the marriage certificate hung, framed.  The gas is here, and you see there is plenty of closet room.  It’s a room everybody likes.  It never stays idle long.”

“Do you have many theatrical people rooming here?” asked the young man.

“They comes and goes.  A good proportion of my lodgers is connected with the theatres.  Yes, sir, this is the theatrical district.  Actor people never stays long anywhere.  I get my share.  Yes, they comes and they goes.”

He engaged the room, paying for a week in advance.  He was tired, he said, and would take possession at once.  He counted out the money.  The room had been made ready, she said, even to towels and water.  As the housekeeper moved away he put, for the thousandth time, the question that he carried at the end of his tongue.

“A young girl—­Miss Vashner—­Miss Eloise Vashner—­do you remember such a one among your lodgers?  She would be singing on the stage, most likely.  A fair girl, of medium height and slender, with reddish, gold hair and a dark mole near her left eyebrow.”

“No, I don’t remember the name.  Them stage people has names they change as often as their rooms.  They comes and they goes.  No, I don’t call that one to mind.”

No.  Always no.  Five months of ceaseless interrogation and the inevitable negative.  So much time spent by day in questioning managers, agents, schools and choruses; by night among the audiences of theatres from all-star casts down to music halls so low that he dreaded to find what he most hoped for.  He who had loved her best had tried to find her.  He was sure that since her disappearance from home this great, water-girt city held her somewhere, but it was like a monstrous quicksand, shifting its particles constantly, with no foundation, its upper granules of to-day buried to-morrow in ooze and slime.