"Look here, Jasper! To show what I think of you I’m going to make you listen to that secret. I—I wasn’t expecting any one to meet me. There’s no one _to_ meet me. Do you get that?" I said that I got it, but found nothing peculiar in the situation. "Oh, but there is, though. I’ve got—I’ve got no friends—not so much as a father or a mother. I never did have. I was—I was left in a basket on a door-step—-twenty-three years ago—and brought up in an orphans’ home in Texas. There, you’ve got it straight! I’ve passed you up the one and only dope on Harry Drinkwater, and any guy that’s afraid he can’t be my friend without wearing a dress-suit to breakfast—" It was so delicate a method of telling me that I was as good as he was that it seemed best to let the subject of our future relations drop. They would settle themselves when I had carried out the plan that had already begun to dawn in me. *CHAPTER VII* Miss Goldie Flowerdew, for that was the name on our note of introduction, was at home, but kept us waiting in a room where I made my first study of a rooming-house. It was another indication of what I had _not_ been in my past life that a rooming-house was new to me. This particular room must in the ’sixties have been the parlor of some prim and prosperous family. It was long, narrow, dark, with dark carpets, and dark coverings to the chairs. Dark pictures hung on dark walls, and dark _objets d’art_ adorned a terrifying chimneypiece in black marble. Folding-doors shut us off from a back room that was probably darker still; and through the interstices of the shrunken woodwork we could hear a vague rustling. The rustling gave place to a measured step, which finally proceeded from the room and sounded along the hall, as if taken to the rhythm of a stone march like that in "Don Giovanni," when the statue of the Commander comes down from its pedestal. My companion and I instinctively stood up, divining the approach of a Presence. The Presence was soon on the threshold, doing justice to the epithet. The statue of the Commander, dressed in the twentieth-century style of sweet sixteen and crowned by a shock of bleached hair of tempestuous wave, would have looked like Miss Goldie Flowerdew as she stood before us majestically, fingering our note of introduction. "So she’s not coming," was her only observation, delivered in a voice so deep that, like Mrs. Siddons’s "Will it wash?" it startled. "Did you expect her?" I ventured to say. The sepulchral voice spoke again. "Which is the blind one?" Drinkwater moved forward. She, too, moved forward, coming into the room and scanning him face to face. "You don’t look so awful blind." "No, but I am—for the present." "For the present? Does that mean that you expect to regain your sight?" "The doctors say that it may come back suddenly as it went." "And suppose it don’t?"