“We may, or may not, ever meet again. In the meantime, I rely on your honor to keep your promise,” said Cutts. “You may do so,” replied the young man, still dazed. “Well, good-by.” The gangplank was down, and the passengers were going off the boat. “Good-by,” returned Harcourt, and followed the stream to the pier to begin his new life. First he went to a barber’s shop and had his handsome dark mustache shaved off, and his rather long, silken dark hair cut short. Then he went to a tailor’s and procured a rough suit of clothes, which, after trying on, he kept on, and had his traveling suit put up in a parcel, which he took under his arm. New York shopkeepers are used to all sorts of queer customers, but they certainly did look a little curiously after this strange young man. “An escaped lunatic, I shouldn’t at all wonder,” remarked the proprietor. Harcourt went in search of cheap lodgings in the lowest and most crowded part of the city. He saw many placards on the front of tall, dingy tenement houses with rooms to let, furnished or unfurnished, with or without board. But on inquiry he found they were rooms on crowded floors, full of bad air, and he wanted an attic or a loft, however poor and bare, that he might have the fresh air which was so needful for the preservation of his health and ability to work. At length, after some hours’ wanderings, he found what he wanted on a street near the water. It was one of the oldest houses of old New York, the basement and ground floors used for small groceries and dry goods and the upper floors as tenements. The attic, of two large rooms, each with two dormer windows, was occupied only by a poor, solitary seamstress, who lived in the front room. The back room was vacant, and bare of furniture, but, like the attic rooms of many old houses, in city as well as country, it had a small open fireplace, with cupboards on each side of the chimney, and its two dormer windows gave a fine view of New York Bay, with its picturesque headlands and islands. Seven dollars a month, in advance, was the price of this attic room. Harcourt paid the money, and went out to buy the cheapest furniture, in the smallest quantity that he could get on with, but not from second-hand dealers; his inherited fastidiousness shrank from the close contact of discarded household goods of whose antecedents he knew nothing. He bought a narrow cot, a straw mattress and pillow, two sets of bed linen, two pairs of blankets and a woolen spread, a pine table, a cane chair, a tea kettle, a coffee pot, a gridiron, and some little crockery and cutlery. All his furniture, new though it was, did not cost him more than twelve dollars. He had this all arranged in his room before night. Lastly, he went down to the baggage room of the steamer, claimed his trunk, and had it brought up to his attic.