He thought it best not to approach the Murdock house in his motor; so he left it at the drug-store corner, and, bidding the chauffeur wait for him, walked down Vevay Street looking for 787. It was a forbidding thoroughfare and the banker resolved to complain to the Civic League; it was an outrage that such Stygian blackness should exist in a civilized city, and he meant to do something about it. When he found the number it proved to be half of a ramshackle two-story double house. The other half was vacant and plastered with For Rent signs. He struck a match and read a dingy card that announced rooms and boarding. The window shades were pulled halfway down, showing lights in the front room. Burgess knocked and in a moment the door was opened guardedly by a stocky, bearded man. “Mr. Murdock?” “Well, what do you want?” growled the man, widening the opening a trifle to allow the hall light behind him to fall on the visitor’s face. “Don’t be alarmed. A friend of Robert Drake’s in Chicago asked me to see him. My errand is friendly.” A woman’s voice called from the rear of the hall: “It’s all right, dad; let the gentleman in.” Murdock slipped the bolt in the door and then scrutinized Burgess carefully with a pair of small, keen eyes. As he bent over the lock the banker noted his burly frame and the powerful arms below his rolled-up shirtsleeves. “Just wait there,” he said, pointing to the front room. He closed the hall door and Burgess heard his step on the stairs. An odor of stale cooking offended the banker’s sensitive nostrils. The furniture was the kind he saw daily in the windows of furniture stores that sell on the installment plan; on one side was an upright piano, with its top littered with music. Now that he was in the house, he wondered whether this Murdock was after all a crook, and whether the girl with the red feather, with her candid eyes, could possibly be his daughter. His wrath against Hill rose again as he recalled his cynical tone--and on the thought the girl appeared from a door at the farther end of the room. She bade him “Good evening!” and they shook hands. She had just come from her day’s work at the lumber company’s office, she explained. He found no reason for reversing his earlier judgment that she was a very pretty girl. Now that her head was free of the hat with the red feather, he saw that her hair, caught up in a becoming pompadour, was brown, with a golden glint in it. Her gray eyes seemed larger in the light of the single gas-burner than they had appeared by daylight at the bank. There was something poetic and dreamy about them. Her age he placed at about half his own, but there was the wisdom of the centuries in those gray eyes of hers. He felt young before her. “There was a detective in the bank when I was in there this morning. He knew me,” she said at once. “Yes; he spoke of you,” said Burgess. “And he knows--what does he know?”