As he took the letter, he involuntarily turned it face upward, and glanced at the address, saying in a dubious tone, his eyebrows raised: “Mrs. Dow? Why not James White himself?” Then adding, with a touch of irony in his voice that Miss Keith missed, “Is his sister acting the kindly part of go-between? Ah, so! Well, Miss Keith, no one but yourself can settle so delicate a matter finally, _but_ one thing promise me: go to Boston, if you will; jig and jostle, hear reform lectures and eat health food, and see life if you must; but for God’s sake, woman, don’t commit yourself until you have seen the ‘_sweet children_’ and the man! Photographs can lie, as well as tongues!” Then, fearing he had been too harsh, he added kindly, “If you find that Tatters can’t transfer himself, as you call it, let me know,—there is always room for one more dog at Oaklands, and Barbara will pamper him.” That night Miss Keith, buoyed by the doctor’s talk and a man’s recent presence in the house, albeit it was temporary, was in an exalted mood and trod on air. Already she saw visions of the future, and kept saying to herself, “I will do and see so and so when I go to Boston.” When she lit her candle and went upstairs, she took the First Cause from the mantel and bore him with her. Where should she put him? Her dresser seemed too intimate a place; the spare room album, too remote. Finally she placed the photograph against the puffs and quills of the pillow-shams of the best room bed and then fled to her own chamber, where she blew out the candle and undressed in the dark, or, rather, by the half moonlight, saying aloud, as she got into bed, “Thank fortune for one thing, I’ve kept my own hair and teeth, and such as I am there is nothing of me that takes off.” And though the remark was apropos of nothing in particular, a wave of hot colour covered her face at the words, and she buried her head in her pillow and tried to sleep. This she didn’t do, for Tatters, whom she had utterly forgotten for the first time, and shut out when she closed the door, resented being forced to sleep out on the porch at such a frosty time, and at intervals throughout the night bayed dismally at the moon, thereby calling to her mind an old ballad of chilling and ominous portent. CHAPTER IV INTERLUDE On a bright afternoon in early December a number of carriages and motor cars that usually entered Central Park via the Plaza promptly at four, continued to the right instead, and in impromptu procession slowed down before the entrance of a new house in the Park Lane section of the avenue.