not see Esther––supposing she were not there? Supposing she had purposely given him the wrong address? Supposing ... oh, supposing a thousand and one things! Micky was full of apprehension when at last the taxicab stopped at the corner of the Brixton Road and the driver came to the door to ask what number.

Micky scrambled out.

“Oh, I’ll walk the rest of the way.”

He paid the man liberally, and set out along the crowded pathway. There were so many people about 33 that he thought it must be a market day or something. A word with a policeman elicited the information that he was at quite the wrong end of the street for the number he wanted. Micky was rather glad. He felt that he needed time in which to collect his thoughts, and yet when at last he reached his destination he felt as nervous as a kitten and strongly inclined to go back. But he went on and up the bare strip of garden which led to the front door of the house. It wasn’t such a bad-looking house, he thought. Not nearly as bad as he had expected from the girl’s description. In fact, once upon a time it must have been rather a palatial residence, but all the windows now were boxed up with cheap, starchy-looking curtains, and there was a sort of third-rate atmosphere about the basement and the cheap knocker on the front door.

33

Micky looked for a bell, but there wasn’t one, so he knocked.

It seemed a long time before anybody came. When at last they did he heard them coming for a long time before the door was opened, heard slipshod steps on shiny linoleum, and a husky sort of breathless cough.

The owner of the cough was young and scared-looking, in shoes several sizes too large for her, and a skirt several inches too short. When Micky asked for Miss Shepstone she stared without answering for a moment, then she turned and slopped back the way she had come, leaving the door on the chain.

Micky chuckled to himself; she evidently did not like the look of him.

He waited patiently; then he heard another step along the shiny linoleumed floor of the hall––a very different step this time––and, turning eagerly, he saw Esther herself in the doorway.

“I didn’t really think you would come,” she said breathlessly.

For a moment Micky could not find his tongue. If he had thought this 

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