"No," was my studiously detached retort, "I intend to walk."

"Latreille was asking, sir, if you would care to have the car laid up."

The significance of that bland suggestion did not escape me. And it did not add to my serenity of mind.

"Just what business is that of Latreille's?" I demanded, with a p.r.i.c.kle of irritation. My patient-eyed old butler averted his glance, with a sigh which he didn't seem quite able to control.

"And at the end of the month," I went on, "I intend to discharge that man, I'm tired of his insolences."

"Yes, sir," Benson softly yet fervently agreed.

My nerves were on edge, I knew, but I wasn't looking for sympathy from my hired help. And when I swung the door shut behind me I am afraid it was a movement far from noiseless.

I was glad to get out into the open, glad to get away from old Benson's commiserative eyes, and have s.p.a.ce about me, and cool air to breathe, and uncounted miles of pavement to weary my legs on.

I noticed, as I turned, into Fifth Avenue, that the moving finger of light on the Metropolitan clock-dial pointed to an hour past midnight.

So I veered about that delta of idleness, where the noontide turbulence of Broadway empties its driftwood into the quietness of the square, and pursued my way up the avenue.

No one can claim to know New York who does not know its avenues in those mystical small hours that fall between the revolving street-sweeper and the robin-call of the first morning paper. Fifth Avenue, above all her sisters, then lies as though tranquillized by Death, as calm as the Coliseum under its Italian moonlight. She seems, under the stars, both medievalized and spiritualized. She speaks then in an intimate whisper foreign to her by day, veiling her earthlier loquacity in a dreaming wonder, softening and sweetening like a woman awaiting her lover. The great steel shafts enclosed in their white marble become turrets crowned with mystery. And the street-floor itself, as clean and polished as a ballroom, seems to undulate off into outer kingdoms of romance. An occasional lonely motor-car, dipping up its gentle slopes like a ship treading a narrow sea-lane buoyed with pearls as huge as pumpkins, only accentuates the midnight solitude.

So up this dustless and odorless and trans.m.u.ted avenue I wandered, as pa.s.sively as a policeman on his beat, asking of the quietness when and how I might capture that crown of weariness known as sleep.

I wandered on, mocked at by a thousand drawn blinds, taunted by a thousand somnolently closed doors. I felt, in that city of rest, as homeless as a prairie wolf. The very smugness of those veiled and self-satisfied house-fronts began to get on my nerves. The very taciturnity of the great silent hostelries irritated me; everything about them seemed so eloquent of an interregnum of rest, of relaxed tension, of invisible reservoirs of life being softly and secretly filled.

Yet as I came to the open width of the Plaza, and saw the wooded gloom of Central Park before me, I experienced an even stronger feeling of disquiet. There seemed something repugnant in its autumnal solitudes.

That vague _agoraphobia_ peculiar to the neurasthenic made me long for the contiguity of my own kind, however unconscious of me and my wandering they might remain. I found myself, almost without thought, veering off eastward into one of the city's side-streets.

Yet along this lateral valley of quietness I wandered as disconsolately as before. What impressed me now was the monotony of the house-fronts which shouldered together, block by block. Each front seemed of the same Indiana limestone, of the same dull gray, as though, indeed, the whole district were a quarry checker-boarded by eroding cross-currents out of the self-same rock. Each tier of windows seemed backed by the same blinds, each street-step barricaded by the same door. I stopped and looked up, wondering if behind those neutral-tinted walls and blinds were lives as bald and monotonous as the materials that screened them. I wondered if an environment so without distinction would not actually evolve a type equally dest.i.tute of individuality.

I turned where I stood, and was about to pa.s.s diffidently on, when one of the most unexpected things that can come to a man at midnight happened to me.

Out of a clear sky, without a note or movement of warning, there suddenly fell at my feet a heavy bundle.

Where it came from I had no means of telling. The house above me was as silent and dark as a tomb. The street was as empty as a church.

Had the thing been a meteor out of a star-lit sky, or a wildcat leaping from a tree-branch, it could not have startled me more.

I stood looking at it, in wonder, as it lay beside the very area-railing on which my hand had rested. Then I stepped back and leaned in over this railing, more clearly to inspect the mystery.

Whatever it was, it had fallen with amazingly little noise. There was no open window to explain its source. There had been no wind to blow it from an upper-story sill. There was no movement to show that its loss had been a thing of ponderable import. Yet there it lay, a mystery which only the deep hours of the night, when the more solemnly imaginative faculties come into play, could keep from being ridiculous.

I stood there for several minutes blinking down at it, as though it were a furred beast skulking in a corner. Then I essayed a movement which, if not above the commonplace, was equally related to common sense. I stepped in through the railing and picked up the parcel. I turned it over several times. Then I sat down on the stone steps and deliberately untied the heavy cord that baled it together.

I now saw why I had thought of that falling bundle as an animal's leap.

It was completely wrapped in what I took to be a Russian-squirrel motor-coat. The tightly tied fur had padded the parcel's fall.

Enclosed in that silk-lined garment I found a smaller bundle, swathed about with several lengths of what seemed to be Irish point lace.

Inside this again were other fragments of lacework. Through these I thrust my exploring fingers with all the alert curiosity of a child investigating a Christmas-tree cornucopia.

There, in the heart of the parcel, I found a collection which rather startled me. The first thing I examined was a chamois bag filled with women's rings, a dozen or more of them, of all kinds. I next drew out a Florentine _repousse_ hand-bag set with turquoises and seed-pearls, and then a moonstone necklace, plainly of antique Roman workmanship.

Next came a black and white Egyptian scarab, and then, of all things, a snuff-box. It was oval and of gold, enameled _en plein_ with a pastoral scene swarming with plump pink Cupids. Even in that uncertain light it required no second glance to a.s.sure me that I was looking down at a rare and beautiful specimen of Louis XV jeweler's art. Then came a small photograph in an oval gold frame. The remainder of the strange collection was made up of odds and ends of jewelry and a leather-covered traveling-clock stamped with gilt initials.

I did not take the time to look more closely over this odd a.s.sortment of valuables, for it now seemed clear that I had stumbled on something as disturbing as it was unexpected. The only explanation of an otherwise inexplicable situation was that a house-breaker was busily operating somewhere behind the gray-stone wall which I faced.

The house behind that wall seemed to take on no new color at this discovery. Its inherent sobriety, its very rectangularity of outline, appeared a contradiction of any claim that it might be harboring a figure either picturesque or picaresque. It was no old mansion stained with time, dark with memories and tears. It carried no atmosphere of romance, no suggestion of old and great adventures, of stately ways and n.o.ble idlers, of intrigues and unremembered loves and hates, of silence and gloom touched with the deeper eloquence of unrecorded history. It was nothing more than a new and narrow and extremely modern house, in the very heart of a modern New York, simple in line and as obvious in architecture as the warehouses along an old-world water-front, as bare of heart as it was bald of face, a symbol of shrill materialities, of the day of utility. It could no more have been a harbor for romance, I told myself, than the stone curb in front of it could be translated into a mountain-precipice threaded with brigand-paths.

Yet I went slowly up those unwelcoming stone steps with the bundle under my arm. The thief at work inside the house, I a.s.sumed, had simply tied the heavier part of his loot together and dropped it from a quietly opened window, to be gathered as quickly up, once he had effected his escape to the street. The sudden afterthought that it might have been dropped for a confederate caused me to look carefully eastward and then as carefully westward. But not a sign of life met my gaze. My figure standing puzzled before that unknown door was the only figure in the street.

Heaven only knows what prompted me to reach out and try that door. It was, I suppose, little more than the habit of a lifetime, the almost unconscious habit of turning a k.n.o.b when one finds oneself confronted by a door that is closed. The thing that sent a little thrill of excitement through my body was that the k.n.o.b turned in my hand, that the door itself stood unlocked.

I stooped down and examined this lock as best I could in the uncertain light. I even ran a caressing finger along the edge of the door.

There was no evidence that it had been jimmied open, just as there was nothing to show that the lock itself did not stand intact and uninjured. A second test of the k.n.o.b, however, showed me that the door was unmistakably open.

My obvious course, at such a time, would have been to wait for a patrolman or to slip quietly away and send word in to police headquarters. But, as I have already said, no man is wholly sane after midnight. Subliminal faculties, ancestral perversions, dormant and wayward tendencies, all come to the surface, emerging like rats about a sleeping mansion. And crowning these, again, was my own neurasthenic craving for activity, my hunger for the narcotizing influence of excitement.

And it has its zest of novelty, this stepping into an unknown and unlighted house at three o'clock in the morning. That novelty takes on a razor-edge when you have fairly good evidence that some one who has no business there has already preceded you into that house.

So as I stepped inside and quietly closed the door after me, I moved forward with the utmost care. Some precautionary sixth sense told me the place was not unoccupied. Yet the darkness that surrounded me was absolute. Not a sound or movement came to my ears as I stood there listening, minute after minute. So I crept deeper into the gloom.

My knowledge of that stereotyped cla.s.s of residence provided me with a very fair idea of where the stairway ought to stand. Yet it took much prodding and groping and pawing about before I came to it. One flicker of a match, I knew, would have revealed the whole thing to me. But to strike a light, under the circ.u.mstances, would be both foolish and dangerous. No house dog, I felt, would interrupt my progress; the mere remembrance of the intruder above me set my mind at rest on this point.

I came to a stop at the head of the first stairway, puzzled by the completeness of the quiet which encompa.s.sed me. I directed my attention to each quarter of the compa.s.s, point by point.

But I might have been locked and sealed in a cistern, so complete was the silence, so opaque was the blackness. Yet I felt that nothing was to be gained by staying where I was.

So I groped and shuffled my way onward, rounding the banister and advancing step by step up the second stairway. This, I noticed, was both narrower and steeper than the first. I was also not unconscious of the fact that it was leading me into a zone of greater danger, for the floor I was approaching, I knew, would be the sleeping floor.

I was half-way up the stairway when something undefined brought me to a sudden stop. Some nocturnal adeptness of instinct warned me of an imminent presence, of a menace that had not yet disclosed itself.

Once more I came to a stop, straining my eyes through the darkness.

Nothing whatever was to be seen. Along the floor of the hallway just above my head, however, pa.s.sed a small but unmistakable sound. It was the soft _frou-frou_ of a skirt, a skirt of silk or satin, faintly rustling as a woman walked the full length of the hall. I had just made a mental register of the deduction that this woman was dressed in street-clothes, and was, accordingly, an intruder from outside, rather than a sleeper suddenly awakened, when a vague suffusion of light filled the s.p.a.ce above me and was as quickly quenched again.

I knew the moment I heard the soft thud of wood closing against wood, that a door had been quietly opened and as quietly closed again. The room into which that door led must have been faintly lighted, for it was the flowering of this refracted light that had caught my attention.

I went silently up the stairs, step by step, listening every now and then as I advanced. Once I reached the floor level I kept close to the wall, feeling my way along until I came to the door I wanted.

There was no way whatever of determining what stood on the other side of that door, without opening it. I knew what risks I ran in attempting any such movement. But I decided it was worth the risk.

Now, if a door is opened slowly, if every quarter-inch of movement is measured and guarded, it can, as a rule, be done noiselessly. I felt quite sure there was not one distinguishable sound as I cautiously turned that bronze k.n.o.b and even more cautiously worked back the door, inch by inch.

I came to a stop when it stood a little more than a foot from the jamb.

I did not, at first, attempt to sidle in through the aperture; that would have been needlessly reckless. I stood there waiting, antic.i.p.ating the effect the door-movement might have had on any occupant of the room, had it been seen.

While I waited I also studied that portion of the chamber which fell within my line of vision. I saw enough to convince me that the room was a bedroom. I could also make out that it was large, and from the rose-pink of its walls to the ivory-white of its furnishings it stood distinctly feminine in its note.

There was, I felt, a natural limit to that period of experimental inaction. The silence lengthened. The crisis of tedium approached, arrived, and pa.s.sed. Audaciousness reconquered me, and I actually advanced a little into the room. Steadying myself with one hand on the door-frame, I thrust my body through the narrow aperture until the whole four walls lay subject to my line of vision.

The first thing I noticed was a green-shaded electric lamp burning on what seemed to be a boudoir writing-table. It left the rest of the room in little more than twilight. But after the utter darkness through which I had groped, this faint illumination was quite adequate for my purposes.

I let my gaze pivot about the room, point by point. Then, if I did not gasp, there was at least a sudden and involuntary cessation of breathing, for standing beside a second door at the farther end of the room was a woman dressed in black. On her head was a black hat, round which a veil was tightly wound, the front of it apparently thrust up hurriedly from her face. But what startled me was the fact that both her att.i.tude and her position seemed such an exact duplication of my own.