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And while he withstood siege and awaited attack he would rid himself of these unlucky caparisons that had been his mortification and his undoing. When they broke in on him–if they did break in on him–he would be found wearing some of Bob Slack’s clothes. Better far to be mistaken for a burglar than to be dragged forth lamentably yet fancifully attired as Himself at the Age of Three. The one thing might be explained–and in time would be; but the other? He felt that he was near the breaking point; that he could no more endure.

XII

He stopped where he was, in the middle of the room, with his eyes and his hands seeking for the seams of the closing of his main garment. Then he remembered what in his stress he had forgotten–the opening or perhaps one should say the closing was at the back. He twisted his arms rearward, his fingers groping along his spine.

Now any normal woman has the abnormal ability to do and then to undo a garment hitching behind. Nature, which so fashioned her elbows that she cannot throw a stone at a hen in the way in which a stone properly should be thrown at a hen, made suitable atonement for this articular oversight by endowing her joints with the facile knack of turning on exactly the right angle, with never danger of sprain or dislocation, for the subjugation of a back-latching frock. Moreover, years of practice have given her adeptness in accomplishing this achievement, so that to her it has become an everyday feat. But man has neither the experience to qualify him nor yet the bodily adaptability.

By reaching awkwardly up and over his shoulder Mr. Leary managed to tug the topmost button of his array of buttons out of its attendant buttonholes, but below and beyond that point he could not progress. He twisted and contorted his body; he stretched his arms in their sockets until twin pangs of agony met and crossed between his shoulder blades, and with his two exploring hands he pulled and fumbled and pawed and wrenched and wrested, to make further headway at his task. But the sewing-on had been done with stout thread; the buttonholes were taut and snug and well made. Those slippery flat surfaces amply resisted him. They eluded him; defied him; outmastered him. Thanks be to, or curses be upon, the passionate zeal of Miss Rowena Skiff for exactitudes, he, lacking the offices of an assistant undresser, was now as definitely and finally inclosed in this distressful pink garment as though it had been his own skin. Speedily he recognised this fact in all its bitter and abominable truth, but mechanically, he continued to wrestle with the obdurate fastenings.

While he thus vainly contended, events in which he directly was concerned were occurring beneath that roof. From within his refuge he heard the sounds of slamming doors, of hurrying footsteps, of excited voices merging into a distracted chorus; but above all else, and from the rest, two of these voices stood out by reason of their augmented shrillness, and Mr. Leary marked them both, for since he had just heard them he therefore might identify their respective unseen owners.

“There’s something–there’s somebody in the house!” At the top of its register one voice was repeating the warning over and over again, and judging by direction this alarmist was shrieking her words through a keyhole on the floor below him. “I saw it–him–whatever it was. I opened my door to look out in the hall and it–he–was right there. Oh, I could have touched him! And then it ran and I didn’t see him any more and I slammed the door and began screaming.”

“You seen what?”

The strident question seemed to come from far below, down in the depths of the house, where the caretaker abided.

“Whatever it was. I opened the door and he was right in the hall there glaring at me. I could have touched it. And then he ran and I—-“