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He heaved another small sigh and passed slowly up the worn steps of the stairwell until he came to the top of the house. His room was on the attic floor, the middle room of the three that lined the bare hall on one side. The door-knob was broken off; only its iron center remained. His fingers slipped as he fumbled for a purchase upon the metal core; but finally, after two attempts, he gripped it and it turned, admitting him into the darkness of a stuffy interior. The major made haste to open the one small window before he lit the single gas jet. Its guttery flare exposed a bed, with a thin mattress and a skimpy cover, shoved close up under the sloping wall; a sprained chair on its last legs; an old horsehide trunk; a shaky washstand of cheap yellow pine, garnished forth with an ewer and a basin; a limp, frayed towel; and a minute segment of pale pink soap.

Major Stone was in the act of removing his coat when he became aware of a certain sound, occurring at quick intervals. In the posture of a plump and mature robin he cocked his head on one side to listen; and now he remembered that he had heard the same sound the night before, and the night before that. These times, though, he had heard it intermittently and dimly, as he tossed about half awake and half asleep, trying to accommodate his elderly bones to the irregularities of his hot and uncomfortable bed. But now he heard it more plainly, and at once he recognized it for what it was–the sound of a woman crying; a wrenching succession of deep, racking gulps, and in between them little moaning, panting breaths, as of utter exhaustion–a sound such as might be distilled from the very dregs of a grief too great to be borne.

He looked about him, his eyes and ears searching for further explanation of this. He had it. There was a door set in the cross-wall of his room–a door bolted and nailed up. It had a transom over it and against the dirty glass of the transom a light was reflected, and through the door and the transom the sound came. The person in trouble, whoever it might be, was in that next room–and that person was a woman and she was in dire distress. There was a compelling note in her sobbing.

Undecided, Major Stone stood a minute rubbing his nose pensively with a small forefinger; then the resolution to act fastened upon him. He slipped his coat back on, smoothed down his thin mane of reddish gray hair with his hands, stepped out into the hall and rapped delicately with a knuckled finger upon the door of the next room. There was no answer, so he rapped a little harder; and at that a sob checked itself and broke off chokingly in the throat that uttered it. From within a voice came. It was a shaken, tear-drained voice–flat and uncultivated.

“Who’s there?” The major cleared his throat. “Is it a woman–or a man?” demanded the unseen speaker without waiting for an answer to the first question.

“It is a gentleman,” began the major–“a gentleman who—-“

“Come on in!” she bade him–“the door ain’t latched.”

And at that the major turned the knob and looked into a room that was practically a counterpart of his own, except that, instead of a trunk, a cheap imitation-leather suitcase stood upright on the floor, its sides bulging and strained from over-packing. Upon the bed, fully dressed, was stretched a woman–or, rather, a girl. Her head was just rising from the crumpled pillow and her eyes, red-rimmed and widely distended, stared full into his.

What she saw, as she sat up, was a short, elderly man with a solicitous, gentle face; the coat sleeves were turned back off his wrists and his linen shirt jutted out between the unfastened upper buttons and buttonholes of his waistcoat. What the major saw was a girl of perhaps twenty or maybe twenty-two–in her present state it was hard to guess–with hunched-in shoulders and dyed, stringy hair falling in a streaky disarray down over her face like unraveled hemp.