The room I took when I left Mrs. Kale's was only a cupboard some nine feet by six in the little house I have mentioned; but it was spotlessly clean, like the kind-looking, stout, blue-eyed Teuton woman who, with skirt tucked up, came to the door when I applied for lodging, and, as the price was nearer my figure than any other I had seen, I closed with Mrs. Loewen, and the afternoon I left Mrs. Kale's sent my trunk over in advance. It held the entire accumulation of my life. There was something about the place and the woman that attracted me. As poor as the house was, it was beyond the squalid quarter and well out in the edge of the city, with a bit of grass before it, and there were not only plants in the windows well cared for; but there was even a rose-bush beside the door making a feeble attempt to clamber over it with the aid of strings and straps carefully adjusted. The only question my landlady asked me was whether I was a musician, and when I told her no, but that I was very fond of music, she appeared satisfied. Her husband, she said, was a drummer. I asked if I might bring my dog, and she assented even to this. "Elsa was fond of animals," she said. When I bade good-by to Mrs. Kale and my friends at the boarding-house, I was pleased at the real regret they showed at my leaving. Miss Pansy and Miss Pinky came down to the drawing-room in their "best" to say good-by; Miss Pinky with her "scratch" quite straight. And Miss Pansy said if they ever went back home she hoped very much I would honor them by coming to see them, while Miss Pinky, with a more practical turn, hoped I would come and see them "there--and you may even bring your dog with you," she added, with what I knew was a proof of real friendship. I promised faithfully to come, for I was touched by the kindness of the two old ladies who, like myself, had slipped from the sphere in which they had belonged, and I was rather grim at the reflection that they had been brought there by others, while I had no one to blame but myself--a solemn fact I was just beginning to face. When I walked out of the house I was in a rather low state of mind. I felt that it was the last day when I could make any pretension to being a gentleman. I had been slipping down, down, and now I was very near the bottom. So I wandered on in the street with Dix at my heels and my pistol in my pocket.