Of this I was certain--from the moment the light fell on her thin-cheeked face, where anxiety seemed to have pointed the soft oval of the chin into something mask-like in its sharpness. About her, quite beyond the fact that her eyes were the most unhappy eyes I had ever seen, hung a muffled air of tragedy, the air of a spirit both bewildered and baffled. But I could see that she was, or that she had been, a rather beautiful young woman, though still again the slenderness of the figure made me think of a saint from a missal. I was still thinking of her as I followed the sullen and slatternly servant up the dark stairs. Once in my new quarters, I glanced absently about at the sulphur-yellow wallpaper and the melancholy antiquities that masqueraded as furniture. Then I came back to the issue at hand. "Who is that young woman in black who happened to pass us in the hall?" I casually inquired. "_Can_ that!" was the apathetic and quite enigmatic retort of the bare-armed girl. I turned to inquire the meaning of this obvious colloquialism. "Aw, cage the zooin' bug!" said my new-found and cynical young friend. "She ain't that kind." "What is she?" I asked, as I slipped a bill into the startled and somewhat incredulous hand of toil. The transformation was immediate. "She ain't nothin'!" was the answer. "She's just a four-flush, an also-ran! And unless she squares wit' the madam by Sat'rday she's goin' to do her washin' in somebody else's bath-tub!" Through this sordid quartz of callousness ran one silver streak of luck. It was plain that I was to be on the same floor with the girl in black. And that discovery seemed quite enough. I waited until the maid was lost in the gloom below-stairs and the house was quiet again. Then I calmly and quietly stepped out into the little hall, pushed open the door of the rear room, and slipped inside. I experienced, as I did so, a distinct and quite pleasurable quickening of the pulse. I found myself in a mere cell of a room, with two dormer windows facing a disorderly vista of chimney-pots and brick walls. On the sill of one window stood an almost empty milk-bottle. Beside the other window was a trunk marked with the initials "H. W." and the pretty-nearly obliterated words "Medicine Hat."