“Help!” said Boots feebly, attempting to bolt; but Selwyn hooked arms with him, laughing excitedly.  In fact Lansing had not seen his friend in such excellent spirits for many, many months; and it made him exceedingly light-hearted, so that he presently began to chant the old service canticle: 

     “I have another, he’s just as bad,
     He almost drives me crazy—­”

And arm in arm they swung into the dark avenue, singing “Barney Riley” in resonant undertones, while overhead the chilly little Western stars looked down through pallid convolutions of moving clouds, and the wind in the gas-lit avenue grew keener on the street-corners.

“Cooler followed by clearing,” observed Boots in disgust.  “Ugh; it’s the limit, this nipping, howling hemisphere.”  And he turned up his overcoat collar.

“I prefer it to a hemisphere that smells like a cheap joss-stick,” said Selwyn.

“After all, they’re about alike,” retorted Boots—­“even to the ladrones of Broad Street and the dattos of Wall. . . .  And here’s our bally bungalow now,” he added, fumbling for his keys and whistling “taps” under his breath.

As the two men entered and started to ascend the stairs, a door on the parlour floor opened and their landlady appeared, enveloped in a soiled crimson kimona and a false front which had slipped sideways.

“There’s the Sultana,” whispered Lansing, “and she’s making sign-language at you.  Wig-wag her, Phil.  Oh . . . good-evening, Mrs. Greeve; did you wish to speak to me?  Oh!—­to Captain Selwyn.  Of course.”

“If you please,” said Mrs. Greeve ominously, so Lansing continued upward; Selwyn descended; Mrs. Greeve waved him into the icy parlour, where he presently found her straightening her “front” with work-worn fingers.

“Captain Selwyn, I deemed it my duty to set up in order to inform you of certain special doin’s,” she said haughtily.

“What ’doings’?” he inquired.

“Mr. Erroll’s, sir.  Last night he evidentially found difficulty with the stairs and I seen him asleep on the parlour sofa when I come down to answer the milkman, a-smokin’ a cigar that wasn’t lit, with his feet on the angelus.”

“I’m very, very sorry, Mrs. Greeve,” he said—­“and so is Mr. Erroll.  He and I had a little talk to-day, and I am sure that he will be more careful hereafter.”

“There is cigar-holes burned into the carpet,” insisted Mrs. Greeve, “and a mercy we wasn’t all insinuated in our beds, one window-pane broken and the gas a blue an’ whistlin’ streak with the curtains blowin’ into it an’ a strange cat on to that satin dozy-do; the proof being the repugnant perfume.”

“All of which,” said Selwyn, “Mr. Erroll will make every possible amends for.  He is very young, Mrs. Greeve, and very much ashamed, I am sure.  So please don’t make it too hard for him.”

She stood, little slippered feet planted sturdily in the first position in dancing, fat, bare arms protruding from the kimona, her work-stained fingers linked together in front of her.  With a soiled thumb she turned a ring on her third finger.