"These are troublous times. All women should know something about
small arms. Again I thank you. For your own sake I trust that we
may never meet again. Good-bye." He stepped out of the window and
vanished.

Kitty, at a mental impasse, could only stare into the night beyond
the window. This mesmeric state endured for a minute; then a gentle
and continuous sound dissipated the spell. It was raining.
Obliquely she saw the burnt egg in the pan. The thing had happened;
she had not been dreaming.

Her brain awoke. Thought crowded thought; before one matured another
displaced it; and all as futile as the sparks from the anvil. An
avalanche of conjecture; and out of it all eventually emerged one
concrete fact. The man Was honest. His hunger had been honest; his
laughter. Who was he, what was he? For all his speech, not English;
for all his gestures, not Italian. Moribund perspectives. Somewhere
that day he had fought for his life. John Two-Hawks.

And there was the mysterious evanishment of old Gregory, whose name
was Stefani Gregor. In a humdrum, prosaic old apartment like this!

Kitty had ideas about adventure - an inheritance, though she was not
aware of that. There had to be certain ingredients, principally
mystery. Anything sordid must not be permitted to edge in. She had
often gone forth upon semi-perilous enterprises as a reporter,
entered sinister houses where crimes had been committed, but always
calculating how much copy at eight dollars a column could be squeezed
out of the affair. But this promised to be something like those