A few minutes after she took her departure Mr. Spencer came across from his office with a little bench. It was the sixth of its kind behind our counter, and he placed it at my station. “The management likes the girls to sit down when not waiting on customers,” he explained to me. “Sit down as often as you can.” That evening at dinner, when describing my new position to Alice, I mentioned the incident of the little bench, and added: “Crooks or honest folk, they are mighty pleasant to work with.” It was later that same night that the tragedy hovering over our quiet rooming-house first made itself heard. I must have been asleep for some time when I was suddenly awakened by a shriek. Listening breathlessly I almost imagined that I had dreamed. A second shriek ending in a moan! Jumping out of bed I ran across the room and looking out the window listened. The torch on the top of the Metropolitan tower made the back yards of that entire block as bright as day. Everything was quiet. There was not a living creature to be seen. Slipping on my cloak I stepped into the hall. A young man was coming up the stairs. “Did you hear a woman scream?” I asked. “Just as I came in the front door,” he told me. “I’m almost sure it came from this floor.” A woman whom I had never seen opened the door next mine. “I’m the widow of a policeman,” she informed the young man and me. “I advise you not to go running around a rooming-house at night when you think you hear somebody scream. I heard nobody scream and I’m a light sleeper. It was your loud talking before my door that waked me up.” She looked the man on the stairs over so fiercely that he hastened to give an account of himself—he was a reporter for a morning paper and seldom got in before three in the morning. On the slight foundation of that conversation the policeman’s widow appointed herself chaperon-in-chief to Alice and me. Her name was Wilkins, and we soon learned that she was a trimmer of men’s stiff hats. Our circle of acquaintances broadened so rapidly that within a few days it included everybody rooming on the top floor. The first of the three front rooms was occupied by a man who kept a restaurant; next him lived a little woman who was organist in a near-by church; while in the third lived a slender young woman, unusually pretty, who was a milliner. In the front skylight room, companion to the one occupied by the reporter, lived a man who, according to Molly, the negro maid, had a walking-stick and a pair of shoes to match every pair of trousers. After making a survey, as it were, of the inhabitants of our top floor, Mrs. Wilkins announced to Alice and me that she was convinced that the shrieks had come from the organist.