Doctors’ protests to the contrary, notwithstanding, Jeremy came back to the office that evening, after a hasty dinner. Overwork might be bad for that second-rate and shop-worn heart of his. Loafing on the job would be a thousand times worse. That was one thing which his temper positively refused to endure. As he ran through the pile of letters, terminating in such suggestive and enticing signatures as “Vengeance,” “Outraged justice,” “Member of the Firing Squad,” “Old Scores,” or (with appropriate and blood-curdling commitments) those old familiars, “X,” “Y,” and “Z,” he realized that the threats were getting on his nerves. He was becoming bored, with an unendurable, deadly boredom, at their repetition. Nor could he deny to himself that they were affecting his actions, though in minor respects. For a week he had gone a block out of his way at night, not to avoid but to pass a certain unlighted alley-mouth wherein, so “Well-Wisher” and “Warned-in-Time,” two (or perhaps one) depressing correspondents had informed him, in feminine handwriting, lurked his intended murderers. Silly though it was to pay any heed, he had to do it. He had to prove to himself the futility of any such intimidation. In vain had Andrew Galpin tried to prevail upon him to carry a revolver. It was the common-sense, reasonable, unromantic thing to do. Jeremy would n’t do it. He would n’t even have one in his desk. But there were times in the long solitary evenings at the office when the unexplained creaking of floor-boards, or that elfin gunnery carried on by invisible sharpshooters in the woodwork of old buildings during nights of changing temperatures, produced sudden effects upon his handwriting which the two-fingered typist, Mr. Burton Higman, subsequently found disconcerting. On this Saturday evening, he had set aside nearly enough epistolary blood-curdlers for his make-up, and was deleting certain anatomical references unsuited to fireside consumption from a rather illiterate but highly expressive letter, when he became aware that a draft from below was driving some papers along the hallway outside. A high wind off the lakes was making clamor through the street, but it had no business inside The Guardian building, and could n’t have got there unless some one had opened the front door. He listened for footsteps on the stairs. Nothing. He returned to his editing. “Getting your throte cut some dark nigt is too Good for you,” his correspondent had written, and suggested, in unpolished terms, disagreeable and lethal substitutes of almost surgical technicality.