But I passed. The black spot frightened me. It was like a black gulf into which I might sink down. I re-passed. I went farther up the street and took myself to task. It was a repetition of my recoil from the children in the afternoon. I must have the nerve—or I must own to myself that I hadn’t. If I hadn’t it, then I had no alternative but Greeley’s Slip. I turned in my steps and passed the house again. If from the blank windows any one had been looking out my actions would have been suspicious. I went far down the street, and came back again far up it. Then when I had no more power of arguing with myself I suddenly found my footsteps crushing the dusty, sun-dried shoots of nettle and blue succory. I was in the vacant lot. All at once fear left me. As well as any old hand in the business I seemed to know what lay before me. At every second some low-down prompting, sprung from nameless depths in my nature, told me what to do. I noted in the first place how accurate the experts had been as to light and shade. The house stood so far up on one of the long avenues that the buildings were thinning out. So, too, the street lamps. They were no more than in the proportion of two to three as compared to their numbers half a mile lower down. Just here they were so placed that not a ray fell into the three or four thousand square feet which had probably never been built upon since Manhattan was inhabited. Even the wall of the house was windowless on this side, for the reason that within a few months some new building would probably block the outlook. Once I had crept close to the wall, I knew I presented neither silhouette nor shade to any chance passer-by. I could feel my way at leisure, cautiously treading burdock and fireweed underfoot. I came to the low wooden fence, in which there was a gate for tradesmen, which was possibly unlocked; but I didn’t run the risk of a click. With my long legs a stride took me over into a small brick-paved court. I paused to reconnoiter. The obscurity here was so dense that only my architect’s instincts told me where the doors and windows would probably be. I located them by degrees. The doors I let alone. The windows I tried, first one and then another, but with no success. There was probably some simple fastening that I could have dealt with had I had a pocket-knife, but the one I had carried for years had long since been lying in a pawnshop. To reflect I sat down on the cover of a bin that was doubtless used for refuse. A footstep alarmed me. It was heavy, measured, slow. With the ease of a snake I was down on my belly, crawling toward cover. Cover offered itself in the form of the single shrub that the court contained—lilac or syringa—growing close against the kitchen wall. Lovey would have commended the silence and swiftness with which I slipped behind it.