He stared at her a moment, then, careful to hide himself from her eyes, he hurried through the passage that had opened, and on down crowded Broadway. The sight of her had startled him deeply. His one meeting with her flashed back into his mind, and all the horrible business of his discovery of Morton's guilt, his own accusation, his trial, his sentence--and he lived them through again with sickening vividness. Presently he began to study if there was any way in which Lillian Drew might affect the future. Morton she could not injure. Morton was too long dead; she had sunk to too low a level for her unsupported word to have belief, and the letters which were her only power had been ashes these five years. As for himself, him she could not touch. No, Lillian Drew was harmless. And yet he could not wholly rid himself of a feeling of uneasiness. When David reached home he found Tom waiting at the head of the little stairway that led down into the basement. The boy had grown much in the last nine months, and the pinched look had given place to a healthy fulness. But he was still the same boy: his cow-lick still was like a curling wave; his clothes would not stay in order, nor his hands clean, despite his desire to please David and Helen Chambers; and the vernacular of the street, notwithstanding his efforts to "talk schoolroom," still mastered his tongue. He stopped David with an air of subdued excitement. "Say," he whispered, "de owner o' de house here, he's downstairs waitin' for you. And say!--but ain't he mad!" The owner of the tenement, who had recently moved into another house he owned in the neighbourhood, had before shown an irascible disposition to interfere in the tenement's management, so Tom's news was no surprise to David. "What's he want?" "I dunno. But he's swearin' like he'd like to eat you alive." The owner, drawn by their voices, came out of David's room and mounted the steps. He belonged to that class of men whose life is a balance between gratification of appetite and the relentless pursuit of small gain, and his coarse, full-lipped, small-eyed face bore the family likeness. "Ain't you this fellow Aldrich?" he demanded aggressively, blocking the head of the stairway. "You know I am," said David. "Yes--but I wanted to hear you confess it with your own lips. I have been hearin' about you from St. Christopher's Mission. Ain't you the fellow that stole that money from there?" David saw the brink of a new disaster. But the owner's manner made him bristle. "Well?" "Well, no crook can be janitor in my house! Take your things out o' that room, and git!" David wanted to seize the owner by the shoulders and shake his mean little soul out upon the sidewalk. "I take my orders from Mr. Rogers," he returned, controlling himself. "And Rogers takes his orders from me. See? Now you git!" "Rogers is my employer." He swore fiercely at David. "Get too fresh, you dirty thief, and I'll punch your face in!" "Please try!"