But Alrick's tilted chair came crashing down on the floor with a resounding whack. His eyes were blazing. "She _ain't_ with him!" he cried. "She _ain't_, she AIN'T, she A-I-N-'T! I won't have it. Why, it's the middle of the night!" And in that electric instant I saw the Pretty Lady's face set rigidly, all except her mouth, which twisted in my direction. "I'll wager she _is_ with him," she whispered under her breath. "She always did tag him wherever he went!" Then I felt the toe of my slipper meet the recumbent elbow of the Partridge Hunter. Had I reached out to him? Or had he reached back to me? There was no time to find out, for the smooth, round conversation shattered prickingly in the hand like a blown-glass bauble, and with much nervous laughter and far-fetched joke-making, we rose, rummaged round for our candles, and climbed upstairs to bed. Alrik's Old Mother burrowed into a corner under the eaves. The Pretty Lady had her usual room, and mine was next to hers. For a lingering moment I dallied with her, craving some tiny, absurd bit of loving service. First, I helped her with a balky hook on her collar. Then I started to put her traveling coat and hat away in the closet. On the upper shelf something a little bit scary brushed my hands. _It was the Blue Serge Man's cap, with a ragged gash across it where Growly-Dog-Gruff had worried it on a day I remembered well._ With a hurried glance over my shoulder to make sure that the Pretty Lady had not also spied it, I reached up and shoved it--oh, 'way, 'way back out of sight, where no one but a detective or a lover could possibly find it. Then I hurried off to my room with a most garish human wonder: How could a _man_ be all gone, but his silly cap _last_? My little room was just as I remembered it, bare, bleak, and gruesomely clean, with a rag rug, a worsted motto, and a pink china vase for really sensuous ornamentation. I opened the cheap pine bureau to stow away my things. _A trinket jingled--a tawdry rhinestone side-comb. Caught in the setting was a tiny wisp of brown hair._ I slammed the drawer with a bang, and opened another. _Metal and leather slid heavily along the bottom._ It might have been my beast's collar, if distinctly across the name-plate had not run the terse phrase "Alrik's Cross Dog." I did not like to have my bureau haunted! When I slammed that drawer, it cracked the looking-glass. Then, with candle burning just as cheerfully as possible, I lay down on the bed in all my clothes and began to _wake up_--wider and wider and wider. My reason lay quite dormant like some drugged thing but my memory, photographic as a lens, began to reproduce the ruddy, blond face of the Blue Serge Man beaming across a chafing-dish; the mournful, sobbing sound of a dog's dream; the crisp, starched, Monday smell of the blue gingham aprons that Alrik's Wife used to wear. The vision was altogether too vivid to be pleasant.