Though it was delivered with entire gravity, the speech provoked a tired and struggling smile on the landlady's plain features. She looked. "Well?" he queried pleasantly. "What do you think? Will you take a chance?" That suppressed motherliness which, embodying the unformulated desire to look after and care for others, turns so many widows to taking lodgers, found voice in Mrs. Brashear's reply: "You've had a spell of sickness, haven't you?" "No," he said, a little sharply. "Where did you get that idea?" "Your eyes look hot." "I haven't been sleeping very well. That's all." "Too bad. You've had a loss, maybe," she ventured sympathetically. "A loss? No.... Yes. You might call it a loss. You'll take me, then?" "You can move in right away," said Mrs. Brashear recklessly. So the Brashear rooming-house took into its carefully guarded interior the young and unknown Mr. Banneker--who had not been sleeping well. Nor did he seem to be sleeping well in his new quarters, since his light was to be seen glowing out upon the quiet street until long after midnight; yet he was usually up betimes, often even before the moving spirit of the house, herself. A full week had he been there before his fellow lodgers, self-constituted into a Committee on Membership, took his case under consideration in full session upon the front steps. None had had speech with him, but it was known that he kept irregular hours. "What's his job: that's what I'd like to know," demanded in a tone of challenge, young Wickert, a man of the world who clerked in the decorative department of a near-by emporium. "Newsboy, I guess," said Lambert, the belated art-student of thirty-odd with a grin. "He's always got his arms full of papers when he comes in." "And he sits at his table clipping pieces out of them and arranging them in piles," volunteered little Mrs. Bolles, the trained nurse on the top floor. "I've seen him as I go past." "Help-wanted ads," suggested Wickert, who had suffered experience in that will-o'-the-wisp chase. "Then he hasn't got a job," deduced Mr. Hainer, a heavy man of heavy voice and heavy manner, middle-aged, a small-salaried accountant. "Maybe he's got money," suggested Lambert. "Or maybe he's a dead beat; he looks on the queer," opined young Wickert. "He has a very fine and sensitive face. I think he has been ill." The opinion came from a thin, quietly dressed woman of the early worn-out period of life, who sat a little apart from the others. Young Wickert started a sniff, but suppressed it, for Miss Westlake was held locally in some degree of respect, as being "well-connected" and having relatives who called on her in their own limousines, though seldom. "Anybody know his name?" asked Lambert. "Barnacle," said young Wickert wittily. "Something like that, anyway. Bannsocker, maybe. Guess he's some sort of a Swede."