THERE is a certain murky likeness between the houses in Fitzroy Square, London, and Gramercy Park, New York. Fitzroy Square belongs to the Georgian days, when Soho was a fashionable suburb, and St. Martins-in-the-Fields was really in the fields, and was not tucked away between a Vaudeville house and a picture gallery. No. 431 had been subdivided by its owner into three self-contained flats, Johnson’s being situated on the ground floor. There was a fourth basement flat, which was occupied by a man and his wife who acted for the owners, and, incidentally, were responsible, in the case of Johnson, for keeping his apartments clean and supplying him with the very few meals that he had on the premises. It was nearly ten o’clock when philosopher Johnson arrived home that evening, and he was a very tired man. He had spent the greater part of the day in making a series of calls upon financial and real estate houses. To his inevitable inquiries he received an inevitable answer. There were no vacancies, and certainly no openings for a stoutish man of fifty, who looked, to the discerning eyes of the merchants concerned or their managing clerks, past his best years of work. Patient Mr. Johnson accepted each rebuff and moved on to another field, only to find his experience repeated. He let himself in with a latchkey, walked wearily into a little sitting-room, and dropped with a sigh to the Chesterfield, for he was not given to violent exercise. The room in which he sat was prettily, but not expensively furnished. A large green carpet covered the floor; the walls were hidden by book-shelves; and there was about the place a certain cosiness which money cannot buy. Rising after some little time, he walked to his book-shelf, took down a volume and spent the next two hours in reading. It was nearly midnight when he turned out the light and went to bed. His bedroom was at the farther end of the short corridor, and in five minutes he was undressed and asleep. Mr. Johnson was usually a light but consistent sleeper, but to-night he had not been asleep an hour before he was awake again. And wider awake than he had been at any portion of the day. Softly he got out of bed, put on his slippers and pulled a dressing-gown round him; then, taking something from a drawer in his bureau, he opened the door and crept softly along the carpeted passage toward his sitting-room. He had heard no sound; it was sheer premonition of a pressing danger which had wakened him. His hand was on the door-knob, and he had turned it, when he heard a faint click. It was the sound of a light being turned off, and the sound came from the sitting-room. With a quick jerk he threw open the door and reached out his hand for the switch; and then, from the blackness of the room, came a warning voice. “Touch that light and you die! I’ve got you covered. Put your gun on the floor at your feet—quick!” Johnson stooped and laid down the revolver he had taken from his bureau.