Opening my door to a crack I peered out. The candle in a saucer which our landlady, Miss O’Brien, had placed on a trunk the night before as a substitute for the gas-jet, had burned out. At first I could see nothing. Then I made out a tall oblong of duskiness—the doorway leading to the staircase. The next instant a dark object filled the dusky space. Another instant and the object disappeared. After a short wait I crept out and looked over the banisters. Once or twice, perhaps three times, I made out a sound so soft that it seemed an echo of the footfall of a cat on the carpeted stairs. Finally there came a sharp click that sent a gentle tremor through the house—the front door had opened and closed. Hurrying back to my room, regardless of the freezing air I threw up the little window and stuck my head far out. Approaching the electric light at the MacDougal Street corner of the square was what looked to be a comfortably dressed working man. He was walking quietly along—evidently on his way to or from work. My interest in Hildegarde Hook had been awakened by her telling me of her first meeting with this man, whom she always spoke of as “my burglar”—she never knew his name. “You know, I never really wake up until after twelve at night,” she had assured me. “Mother is like that—mother and I are just alike except that mother hasn’t my colossal brain. She says so herself.” Such was the introduction with which she always began her description of the incident. A stormy night during the previous winter she took shelter under the arcade in front of Madison Square Garden, waiting for a particularly heavy downpour to slacken. It was bitterly cold, and she noted that the only lighted window in sight was that of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. She was just debating applying for shelter in the Society room on the plea of being a human animal, when she became aware that another person was occupying the opposite door-jamb. “Say, sis,” a man’s voice whispered, “kin youse see the door to that cigar-store at corner of Twenty-seventh Street?” When Hildegarde replied that she could, the voice added: “Keep your lamps peeled; when youse see that cop hidin’ in the shadder ’cross the corner go in, gimme the git-away, liker good gal.” Until then Hildegarde had not noticed the dark figure of the policeman, so nearly did his rain-washed rubber coat and helmet match the moist and glistening darkness surrounding him. Standing there in the doorway of Madison Square Garden she learned that the man who had spoken to her had served three terms in the penitentiary for burglary, and was wanted for a fourth offense. He had mistaken her for a “woman of the streets” and naturally supposed that she also was hiding from the rubber-clad officer of the law.