The door was opened by the landlady.  I had seen hundreds like her.  And I had smelled before that cold, dank, furnished draught of air that hurried by her to escape immurement in the furnished house.

She was stout, and her face and lands were as white as though she had been drowned in a barrel of vinegar.  One hand held together at her throat a buttonless flannel dressing sacque whose lines had been cut by no tape or butterick known to mortal woman.  Beneath this a too-long, flowered, black sateen skirt was draped about her, reaching the floor in stiff wrinkles and folds.

The rest of her was yellow.  Her hair, in some bygone age, had been dipped in the fountain of folly presided over by the merry nymph Hydrogen; but now, except at the roots, it had returned to its natural grim and grizzled white.

Her eyes and teeth and finger nails were yellow.  Her chops hung low and shook when she moved.  The look on her face was exactly that smileless look of fatal melancholy that you may have seen on the countenance of a hound left sitting on the doorstep of a deserted cabin.

I inquired for Paley.  After a long look of cold suspicion the landlady spoke, and her voice matched the dingy roughness of her flannel sacque.

Paley?  Was I sure that was the name?  And wasn’t it, likely, Mr. Sanderson I meant, in the third floor rear?  No; it was Paley I wanted.  Again that frozen, shrewd, steady study of my soul from her pale-yellow, unwinking eyes, trying to penetrate my mask of deception and rout out my true motives from my lying lips.  There was a Mr. Tompkins in the front hall bedroom two flights up.  Perhaps it was he I was seeking.  He worked of nights; he never came in till seven in the morning.  Or if it was really Mr. Tucker (thinly disguised as Paley) that I was hunting I would have to call between five and—­

But no; I held firmly to Paley.  There was no such name among her lodgers.  Click! the door closed swiftly in my face; and I heard through the panels the clanking of chains and bolts.

I went down the steps and stopped to consider.  The number of this house was 43.  I was sure Paley had said 43—­or perhaps it was 45 or 47—­I decided to try 47, the second house farther along.

I rang the bell.  The door opened; and there stood the same woman.  I wasn’t confronted by just a resemblance—­it was the SAME woman holding together the same old sacque at her throat and looking at me with the same yellow eyes as if she had never seen me before on earth.  I saw on the knuckle of her second finger the same red-and-black spot made, probably, by a recent burn against a hot stove.

I stood speechless and gaping while one with moderate haste might have told fifty.  I couldn’t have spoken Paley’s name even if I had remembered it.  I did the only thing that a brave man who believes there are mysterious forces in nature that we do not yet fully comprehend could have done in the circumstances.  I backed down the steps to the sidewalk and then hurried away frontward, fully understanding how incidents like that must bother the psychical research people and the census takers.