"Of course. Well, Mr. Banneker, for the protection of the house I must have references."

"References? You mean letters from people?"

"Not necessarily. Just a name or two from whom I can make inquiries. You have friends, I suppose."

"No."

"Your family--"

"I haven't any."

"Then the people in the place where you work. What is your business, by the way?"

"I expect to go on a newspaper."

"Expect?" Mrs. Brashear stiffened in defense of the institution. "You have no place yet?"

He answered not her question, but her doubt. "As far as that is concerned, I'll pay in advance."

"It isn't the financial consideration," she began loftily--"alone," she added more honestly. "But to take in a total stranger--"

Banneker leaned forward to her. "See here, Mrs. Brashear; there's nothing wrong about me. I don't get drunk. I don't smoke in bed. I'm decent of habit and I'm clean. I've got money enough to carry me.

Couldn't you take me on my say-so? Look me over."

Though it was delivered with entire gravity, the speech provoked a tired and struggling smile on the landlady's plain features. She looked.

"Well?" he queried pleasantly. "What do you think? Will you take a chance?"

That suppressed motherliness which, embodying the unformulated desire to look after and care for others, turns so many widows to taking lodgers, found voice in Mrs. Brashear's reply:

"You've had a spell of sickness, haven't you?"

"No," he said, a little sharply. "Where did you get that idea?"

"Your eyes look hot."

"I haven't been sleeping very well. That's all."

"Too bad. You've had a loss, maybe," she ventured sympathetically.

"A loss? No.... Yes. You might call it a loss. You'll take me, then?"

"You can move in right away," said Mrs. Brashear recklessly.

So the Brashear rooming-house took into its carefully guarded interior the young and unknown Mr. Banneker--who had not been sleeping well. Nor did he seem to be sleeping well in his new quarters, since his light was to be seen glowing out upon the quiet street until long after midnight; yet he was usually up betimes, often even before the moving spirit of the house, herself. A full week had he been there before his fellow lodgers, self-constituted into a Committee on Membership, took his case under consideration in full session upon the front steps. None had had speech with him, but it was known that he kept irregular hours.

"What's his job: that's what I'd like to know," demanded in a tone of challenge, young Wickert, a man of the world who clerked in the decorative department of a near-by emporium.

"Newsboy, I guess," said Lambert, the belated art-student of thirty-odd with a grin. "He's always got his arms full of papers when he comes in."

"And he sits at his table clipping pieces out of them and arranging them in piles," volunteered little Mrs. Bolles, the trained nurse on the top floor. "I've seen him as I go past."

"Help-wanted ads," suggested Wickert, who had suffered experience in that will-o'-the-wisp chase.

"Then he hasn't got a job," deduced Mr. Hainer, a heavy man of heavy voice and heavy manner, middle-aged, a small-salaried accountant.

"Maybe he's got money," suggested Lambert.

"Or maybe he's a dead beat; he looks on the queer," opined young Wickert.

"He has a very fine and sensitive face. I think he has been ill." The opinion came from a thin, quietly dressed woman of the early worn-out period of life, who sat a little apart from the others. Young Wickert started a sniff, but suppressed it, for Miss Westlake was held locally in some degree of respect, as being "well-connected" and having relatives who called on her in their own limousines, though seldom.

"Anybody know his name?" asked Lambert.

"Barnacle," said young Wickert wittily. "Something like that, anyway.

Bannsocker, maybe. Guess he's some sort of a Swede."

"Well, I only hope he doesn't clear out some night with his trunk on his back and leave poor Mrs. Brashear to whistle," declared Mrs. Bolles piously.

The worn face of the landlady, with its air of dispirited motherliness, appeared in the doorway. "Mr. Banneker is a _gentleman_," she said.

"Gentleman" from Mrs. Brashear, with that intonation, meant one who, out of or in a job, paid his room rent. The new lodger had earned the title by paying his month in advance. Having settled that point, she withdrew, followed by the two other women. Lambert, taking a floppy hat from the walnut rack in the hall, went his way, leaving young Wickert and Mr.

Hainer to support the discussion, which they did in tones less discreet than the darkness warranted.

"Where would he hail from, would you think?" queried the elder. "Iowa, maybe? Or Arkansas?"

"Search me," answered young Wickert. "But it was a small-town carpenter built those honest-to-Gawd clothes. I'd say the corn-belt."

"Dressed up for the monthly meeting of the Farmers' Alliance, all but the oil on his hair. He forgot that," chuckled the accountant.

"He's got a fine chance in Nuh Yawk--of buying a gold brick cheap,"

prophesied the worldly Wickert out of the depths of his metropolitan experience. "Somebody ought to put him onto himself."

A voice from the darkened window above said, with composure, "That will be all right. I'll apply to you for advice."

"Oh, Gee!" whispered young Wickert, in appeal to his companion. "How long's he been there?"

Acute hearing, it appeared, was an attribute of the man above, for he answered at once:

"Just put my head out for a breath of air when I heard your kind expressions of solicitude. Why? Did I miss something that came earlier?"

Mr. Hainer melted unostentatiously into the darkness. While young Wickert was debating whether his pride would allow him to follow this prudent example, the subject of their over-frank discussion appeared at his elbow. Evidently he was as light of foot as he was quick of ear.

Meditating briefly upon these physical qualities, young Wickert said, in a deprecatory tone:

"We didn't mean to get fresh with you. It was just talk."

"Very interesting talk."

Wickert produced a suspiciously jeweled case. "Have a cigarette?"