"All right," she smiled, closing the door. "Pleasant dreams." The only answer was a scuffling of feet and a muffled slamming sound. Mrs. Tibbets cocked her head, shrugged, and went back upstairs. She was worried about her new roomer. * * * * * Two weeks later, she was still worried. She felt it was her responsibility, in a way, to keep him healthy. After all, if he got sick, might not the local authorities protest her renting out such a damp, germ-breeding place? She was too worried to even share in Mrs. Leonetti's misgivings about the mysterious attacks in the neighborhood. Mrs. Leonetti was afraid to go out at night, what with the mounting number of men and women found pale-faced and incoherent in their beds in the mornings, though now and then they'd be found upon the grass in the park, or slumped in a doorway on the main street. The police were calling them "attacks" because the word was ambiguous enough to refer either to a malefactor of some sort or just a poor state of the victims' health. It was Mrs. Tibbets' opinion that it was just "something that was going 'round." She thought of it hardly at all, unless Mrs. Leonetti brought the topic up. Mostly, she was worried about Mister Thobal. Perhaps _he_ was getting whatever was laying these others low. He certainly didn't _look_ very healthy. "Vitamin deficiency," said Mrs. Leonetti, in reply to a query of Mrs. Tibbets. "He's-a no got the right vitamins. I'm-a read in a medical story in a magazine. It's-a called a vitamin deficiency." "Don't see how I can help him, then," sighed Mrs. Tibbets. "No way to get vitamins to the man if he doesn't eat his meals here." She brooded and worried about the state of her roomer's health until she could think of nothing else. She rarely saw him. Only the few times she went down into the cellar to "get something" she "needed" from one of the cartons did she see him. He never, after that first night, came into the upstairs part of the house at all. "He could be sick, dead, or dying," she said to herself. "And I'd never find out until the five hundred dollars was used up. It's my _duty_ to check on him." So every so often, making some excuse or other, she'd go downstairs and rummage through the dusty cartons there, hoping for a glimpse of him, still alive. But he never came out of the room by day, and at nightfall, she wasn't quite up to facing him in the darkened cellar alone. When an entire week had passed without her so much as catching a glimpse of him, she couldn't stand it any longer. "I'll just peep into his room, quietly, and see if he's all right," she said to herself. But just to be on the safe side, she waited till almost sunset. "That way," she assured herself, "if I _do_ waken him, it'll be about time for him to get up for work anyhow." * * * * *