Above him a window opened.  He glanced up.  The countess incog. was leaning out, scanning the street uncaringly.  Why—­her windows were next to his!  He was living next room to an unusual person—­as unusual as Dr. Mittyford.

He hurried up-stairs with a fervid but vague plan to meet her.  Maybe she really was a French countess or somepun’.  All evening, sitting by the window, he was comforted as he heard her move about her room.  He had a friend.  He had started that great work of making friends—­well, not started, but started starting—­then he got confused, but the idea was a flame to warm the fog-chilled spaces of the London street.

At his Cattermole breakfast he waited long.  She did not come.  Another day—­but why paint another day that was but a smear of flat dull slate?  Yet another breakfast, and the lady of mystery came.  Before he knew he was doing it he had bowed to her, a slight uneasy bend of his neck.  She peered at him, unseeing, and sat down with her back to him.

He got much good healthy human vindictive satisfaction in evicting her violently from the French chateau he had given her, and remembering that, of course, she was just a “fool freak Englishwoman—­prob’ly a bloomin’ stoodent” he scorned, and so settled her! Also he told her, by telepathy, that her new gown was freakier than ever—­a pale-green thing, with large white buttons.

As he was coming in that evening he passed her in the hall.  She was clad in what he called a bathrobe, and what she called an Arabian burnoose, of black embroidered with dull-gold crescents and stars, showing a V of exquisite flesh at her throat.  A shred of tenuous lace straggled loose at the opening of the burnoose.  Her radiant hair, tangled over her forehead, shone with a thousand various gleams from the gas-light over her head as she moved back against the wall and stood waiting for him to pass.  She smiled very doubtfully, distantly—­the smile, he felt, of a great lady from Mayfair.  He bobbed his head, lowered his eyes abashedly, and noticed that along the shelf of her forearm, held against her waist, she bore many silver toilet articles, and such a huge heavy fringed Turkish bath-towel as he had never seen before.

He lay awake to picture her brilliant throat and shining hair.  He rebuked himself for the lack of dignity in “thinking of that freak, when she wouldn’t even return a fellow’s bow.”  But her shimmering hair was the star of his dreams.

Napping in his room in the afternoon, Mr. Wrenn heard slight active sounds from her, next room.  He hurried down to the stoop.

She stood behind him on the door-step, glaring up and down the street, as bored and as ready to spring as the Zoo tiger.  Mr. Wrenn heard himself saying to the girl, “Please, miss, do you mind telling me—­I’m an American; I’m a stranger in London—­I want to go to a good play or something and what would I—­what would be good—­”