I expected ease to come into the woman's drawn face, and relaxation to her stooping figure. But something else came upon both, something quite unwonted and inexplicable; a wandering look in the eyes, a stupid drop to the mouth, an uncertainty in her walk, as of one who is half minded to go back and look for something. There was, too, an irritating irregularity in the performance of her work, which began to be annoying. At last, on that October day, this new unreliability reached the limit of provocation. I was leaving the city; I needed my laundry, needed it at once; and here it was four o'clock in the afternoon, the train due at night, and packing impossible till the wash came. It was five days overdue. The wind was howling furiously, the rain driving in sheets, but there was no alternative; I must get to the "End of the Alley" and back, somehow. The gray, rain-drenched atmosphere was still grayer in the alley,--still, still grayer at the end. And what with the gray of it and the rain of it, I could scarcely see the thing that sat facing me when I opened the door,--a sort of human blur, hunched in a rocking-chair, its head sunken on its breast. In response to my startled exclamation, the face was lifted vacantly for a second, and then dropped again. But I had seen: drunk, dead drunk! And this woman had never drunk. I looked around the wretched room. By the window, where the gray light trailed in, stood a table covered with unwashed dishes; some late flies were crawling in the gutters of slop, besotted derelicts of insects, stupidly staggering up and down the cracked china. On the stove stood a number of flat-irons, but there was no fire. A mass of unironed clothes lay on an old couch and over the backs of two unoccupied chairs. On the wall above the couch, hung the portrait of the dead man. I walked to the slumping figure in the rocker, and with ill-contained brutality demanded: "So this is why you did not bring my clothes! Where are they?" I heard my own voice cutting like the edge of a knife, and felt half-ashamed when that weak, shaking thing lifted up its foolish face, and stared at me with watery, uncomprehending eyes. "My clothes," I reiterated; "are they here or upstairs?" "Guess-s-so," stammered the uncertain voice, "g-guess so." "Nothing for it but to find them myself," I muttered, beginning the search through the pile on the couch. Nothing of mine there, so I needs must climb to the Golgotha on the second floor, from which the Cross had disappeared, but which still bore traces of its victim's long crucifixion,--a pair of old bed-slippers still by the window, a sleeping-cap on the wall. Some cannot but leave so the things that have touched their dead.