A girl and a dog came down the steep brownstone steps; the dog in short, frog-like leaps (he was a Boston terrier, large for his breed), the girl holding on to his leash with one hand, to her cap-like hat with the other. It was a dark, cold April day, six o’clock in the afternoon, and she pulled her fur coat around her when they reached the sidewalk.She would have turned left to Madison, but the dog preferred the long stretch to Fifth—the Austen house was near the Madison Avenue corner. She followed, indifferent. Rena Austen did not care for the dog Aby, he was the only dog in her life that she had never liked: his brindled coat always felt hot and damp to the hand, his hindquarters hung loose on him and waggled disagreeably at a gesture or a word. He was a sycophant and a coward. But she realized that she ought to feel grateful to Aby, since he was her excuse for getting out of the house and away from human company at this depressing hour. By human company she meant that of the Austens; she seldom saw anybody else.

There was a row of narrow casement windows across the east end of the bedroom, and a sash window, broad and high, in the north wall. The middle casement window was partly open, the sash window shut tightly and screwed down.To the north old trees, barely in leaf, screened the view up-river; to the east the grounds were cut sharply off where the cliff ended. A pale, cold April light, subdued by grey skies, came into the room bleakly. It was a comfortable, almost a luxurious room, but it had a clumsy, cluttered look to modern eyes; it was old-fashioned in an unfashionable way. It had an oriental rug on the floor, a gilt-framed oil landscape over the chimney piece, thick silk curtains, pottery lamps with silk shades, ornate wooden furniture, a double bed. Logs burned in the fireplace—it was a cold afternoon.

It might have been an empty house. The windows were all shuttered, the columns on either side of the small portico were defaced by scribblings in red chalk and pencil, the white front door needed a coat of paint. Dust, and dead leaves from one of the little trees that struggled for existence along the avenue, had blown against the sill, which was almost flush with the street.The house seemed to have two front entrances, one above the other; a not uncommon sight even on Park Avenue since the days when all these dwellings had lost their high stoops in the interests of city development. They had been remodeled in various ways, and this house in the quickest, cheapest and easiest way—by constructing a new front door in place of a basement window, closing up the old storm doors above, and placing an ornamental rail around the old original doorstep; thus simulating a little balcony.Gamadge, looking up at the dark front windows in the twilight of the December afternoon, guessed that Miss Paxton, temporarily residing there as a sort of honorary agent and caretaker, used back rooms for the sake of quiet. But he reflected, looking up and down the avenue, that this was as quiet a stretch as you could find in New York; far uptown, with private houses—some of them empty—on both sides of the way.

The voice on the telephone was deep for a woman’s, sad and slow. It asked: “Is this really Mr. Gamadge himself talking?”“This is Gamadge.”“I’m Harriet Leeder—Mrs. Clayborn Leeder. It’s such a private matter that I shouldn’t have liked to give anybody else my name. Might I ask you not to mention the fact that I called to anybody at all, whether you are able to help me or not?”“I won’t mention it.”“You don’t know me, but friends of yours do. I haven’t told them anything—only that I needed advice. It’s a family thing, and rather horrid. From what they say, I really think you may be my only hope.”Gamadge had not been giving his full attention to the speaker. He stood at the telephone table in the hall, looking through the double doorway of the library; and the scene he watched was nerve-racking. His young assistant, David Malcolm, stood in the middle of the room with an arm upraised above his head, and on his palm the Gamadge baby was balanced as a waiter balances a tray. The baby, mildly interested as usual, made swimming motions with its arms and legs.Gamadge said loudly: “Put that thing down before you break it.”“I beg your pardon?” asked the telephone.“I beg yours.” Gamadge waited until the baby had been lowered to the rug, and then apologized again: “I’m awfully sorry. I was interrupted.”“We can’t be overheard?”“Absolutely not.” “I know I shouldn’t be taking a moment of your time, much less asking you to come to see me. Our friends say that you’re just back from Europe, and that

“Look through here, Henry,” said Miss Ryder. “You can see it if you look through here.”Gamadge, pretending interest—Miss Abigail Ryder was his only female relative and seventy years old—peered through the meshes of the seven-foot wire fence into greenery. He said: “I can’t see a thing.”Miss Ryder took hold of his arm and jerked him closer to her side: “Look where I’m looking.”Gamadge could do so only by further reducing his own height. He bent, flattened his nose against the wire, and gazed earnestly through the gap in the inner hedge. He could now see across a broad lawn, through a trellised archway, and to the very end of an enclosed garden. After a moment he asked incredulously: “What on earth?”Miss Ryder said triumphantly: “You tell me!”“Can’t tell you. Never saw anything like it.”“Whatever it is, imagine Johnny Redfield putting it up in his rose garden!”“Must be a curio. But even if it is, where’s his celebrated taste we never hear the end of?”

“Mrs. Gamadge, that woman’s there again.”Clara looked up from the letter she was writing to her husband. Long shadows from the trees across the road came up the slope of the yard, up to the very edge of the narrow porch on which she was sitting, her feet in rough grass. Clara’s face was rosy in the evening light; but the elderly maid, who stood under the branches of a maple at the corner of the cottage, had not all her customary high color.Clara herself was disquieted, but she had adopted an attitude, and was maintaining it. “Up on the ridge?” she asked, with what seemed no more than mild curiosity.“Ma’am, she’s come down the hill. She’s halfway to our wall.”“Then she’s on her way here, and we’ll find out who she is,” said Clara, cheerfully.

Schenck pushed the ball of crumpled paper across the table. “The trouble is,” he said, “you don’t get your mail.”Gamadge picked the thing up and smoothed it out. It proved to be a buff-colored envelope of good quality, addressed in neat typing to Blake Fenway, Esq., in the east seventies. A business address was printed in the upper left-hand corner: J. Hall. Rare Books. In the upper right-hand corner was a cancelled stamp; the postmark was dated January 29th.

The plump little man leaned over Gamadge’s shoulder and squeaked in his ear: “Who am I?”“Hutter!”“It’s a wonder you knew me.” Sylvanus Hutter circled Gamadge’s chair, pulled one up for himself, and sat down. He smiled and rubbed his knees. “That last reunion was in 1927.”“Good Heavens.” Gamadge had laid aside his magazine, to gaze benevolently at his old classmate. “ ’27 from ’42 leaves fifteen.”“That’s New York for you! But of course I’m always on the wing; or was,” his face fell, “until recently. Life will be different for awhile, I suppose.”“Plenty of things to see on our continent.”

Theodore, his old colored servant, came in with a card on a tray.“Lady to see you, Mr. Gamadge; she say she have no appointment, but Mrs. Harrison Barclay tell her you ain’t stiff about things like that. I wanted to say you ain’t stiff enough about anything.”“The wonder is you didn’t turn her away.” Gamadge took the card, and read what was on it.“She ain’t anybody to turn away, Mr. Gamadge. Nice lady, not as young as she was any more; came in a nice little car with a chow dog in it, young lady drivin’—you don’t see many young ladies like her around this town.”“Glad you approve of the outfit. Quite a nice name on the card, too,” said Gamadge.“You goin’ to see this lady?”“Of course I am. Nobody turns down a Vauregard.”

Gamadge hunched up his shoulders against the rawness of the November air and peered from under his hat-brim at the little archway with its ornamental lantern. He asked: “But why does she live in a dump like this? Two hundred thousand dollars, and lives in a dump like this.”“Dump! My good fellow! We’ve made a very nice thing of it. It has atmosphere.”“That’s what you brokers tell the clients, is it?” Mr. Gamadge was not in his usual state of amiability. He glanced about him, without taking his chin out of the depths of his upturned collar. His gloved hands were crammed into the pockets of his overcoat. His eyes were screwed up, full of resentment. “You get deaf people here, I suppose?”“Deaf? Deaf? What do you mean by deaf?”“Your tenants like to listen to the Third Avenue L?”

Pine trunks in a double row started out of the mist as the headlights caught them, opened to receive the car, passed like an endless screen, and vanished. The girl on the back seat withdrew her head from the open window.“We’ll never get there at this rate,” she said. “We’re crawling.”The older woman sat far back in her corner, a figure of exhausted elegance. She said, keeping her voice low: “In this fog, I don’t think it would be safe to hurry.”“I should think it would be safer than keeping him up all night.”“We’ll see what Hugh thinks.”