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“Ninety-six, ninety-seven, ninety-eight, ninety — Oh, darn it! What’s the use!” cried Gertie, and hurled the brush across the room with a crack.

She sat looking after it with wide, staring eyes until the brush blurred in with the faded red roses on the carpet. When she found it doing that she got up, wadded her hair viciously into a hard bun in the back instead of braiding it carefully as usual, crossed the room (it wasn’t much of a trip), picked up the brush, and stood looking down at it, her under lip caught between her teeth. That is the humiliating part of losing your temper and throwing things. You have to come down to picking them up, anyway.

Her lip still held prisoner, Gertie tossed the brush on the bureau, fastened her nightgown at the throat with a safety pin, turned out the gas and crawled into bed.

Perhaps the hard bun at the back of her head kept her awake. She lay there with her eyes wide open and sleepless, staring into the darkness.

At midnight the Kid Next Door came in whistling, like one unused to boarding-house rules. Gertie liked him for that. At the head of the stairs he stopped whistling and came softly into his own third floor back just next to Gertie’s. Gertie liked him for that, too.

The two rooms had been one in the fashionable days of the Nottingham curtain district, long before the advent of Mis’ Buck. That thrifty lady, on coming into possession, had caused a flimsy partition to be run up, slicing the room in twain and doubling its rental.

Lying there Gertie could hear the Kid Next Door moving about getting ready for bed and humming “Every Little Movement Has a Meaning of Its Own” very lightly, under his breath. He polished his shoes briskly, and Gertie smiled there in the darkness of her own room in sympathy. Poor kid, he had his beauty struggles, too.

Gertie had never seen the Kid Next Door, although he had come four months ago. But she knew he wasn’t a grouch, because he alternately whistled and sang off-key tenor while dressing in the morning. She had also discovered that his bed must run along the same wall against which her bed was pushed. Gertie told herself that there was something almost immodest about being able to hear him breathing as he slept. He had tumbled into bed with a little grunt of weariness.

Gertie lay there another hour, staring into the darkness. Then she began to cry softly, lying on her face with her head between her arms. The cold cream and the salt tears mingled and formed a slippery paste. Gertie wept on because she couldn’t help it. The longer she wept the more difficult her sobs became, until finally they bordered on the hysterical. They filled her lungs until they ached and reached her throat with a force that jerked her head back.

“Rap-rap-rap!” sounded sharply from the head of her bed.

Gertie stopped sobbing, and her heart stopped ,beating. She lay tense and still, listening. Everyone knows that spooks rap three times at the head of one’s bed. It’s a regular high-sign with them.

“Rap-rap-rap!”

Gertie’s skin became goose-flesh, and coldwater effects chased up and down her spine.

“What’s your trouble in there?” demanded an unspooky voice so near that Gertie jumped. “Sick?”

It was the Kid Next Door.

“N-no, I’m not sick,” faltered Gertie, her mouth close to the wall. Just then a belated sob that had stopped halfway when the raps began hustled on to join its sisters. It took Gertie by surprise, and brought prompt response from the other side of the wall.

“I’ll bet I scared you green. I didn’t mean to, but, on the square, if you’re feeling sick, a little nip of brandy will set you up. Excuse my mentioning it, girlie, but I’d do the same for my sister. I hate like sin to hear a woman suffer like that, and, anyway, I don’t know whether you’re fourteen or forty, so it’s perfectly respectable. I’ll get the bottle and leave it outside your door.”