And so, as the story of Oliver October really begins at seven o’clock in the evening, regardless of all that may have transpired in the preceding twelve hours of his life, we will open the narrative with Mr. Joseph Sikes hovering in solitary gloom over the base-burner in the sitting-room to the right of the small vestibule hall whose door opened upon the snow-covered, wind-swept front porch. For the better part of an hour he had been sitting there, listening with tense, apprehensive ears to the brisk footsteps in the room overhead. The sitting-room was cold, for Joseph had neglected to close the front door tightly on entering the house and the wind had blown it ajar, permitting quite an accumulation of snow to carpet the hall. He had purposely left the sitting-room door open in order to hear the better what was going on at the top of the stairs. His attention was called to this almost criminal act some fifteen or twenty minutes after its commission by the sound of a man’s voice in the upper hall. It was an agitated voice and it was raised considerably in the effort to make itself heard by some one on the other side of a closed, intervening door. “Say, Serepty, I—I think the front door is open,” the voice was saying. Joseph wasn’t sure, but he thought it belonged to Oliver Baxter. At any rate, the speaker was in the upper hall. After a moment it continued. “Like as not Mary and the baby will ketch cold and die if—” A door squeaked upstairs and then came the voice of Serepta Grimes. “My goodness! Of course, it’s open. Haven’t you got sense enough to go down and shut it? Who left it open anyway? You?” “I thought I heard somebody come in a little while ago. Must have been—” “Go down and shut it this instant. And stay downstairs, you goose.” The door closed sharply and Mr. Sikes, recovering from a temporary paralysis, clumsily got to his feet and hurried into the hall. “Never mind, Ollie,” he whispered hoarsely to the figure descending the stairs. “I’ll shut it. Some darned fool must have forgot to close it.” “Isn’t that snow on the floor?” demanded Mr. Baxter, pausing midway on the stairs. The light from the sitting-room door fell upon his pinched, worried face as he peered, blinking, over the banister. “Must have blowed in,” mumbled Joseph guiltily. “You don’t suppose she’s taken cold, do you, Ollie?” “She probably has,” groaned Mr. Baxter. “She’s—she’s dying anyhow, Joe—she hasn’t got more than half an hour to live. I—” “Is the doctor up there?” “No. He ain’t been here since five o’clock. Oh, the poor—” “I guess she’s all right or he wouldn’t have gone off and left her,” said Mr. Sikes consolingly. “I guess it wouldn’t be a bad idea to sweep all this snow out. Where’ll I find a broom?” “In the kitchen—in the kitchen, Joe. My God, what have I ever done that we should have a blizzard like this on the one day that—”