I congratulate you on your coming friend!" At which Mr. Tompkins,
chuckling, lighted a pipe for himself.

Mr. Larcher sat looking dubious. If Murray Davenport was an unusual sort
of man, the more wonder that a girl like Edna Hill should so strangely
busy herself about him.




CHAPTER II.


ONE OUT OF SUITS WITH FORTUNE

Two days later, toward the close of a sunny afternoon, Mr. Thomas Larcher
was admitted by a lazy negro to an old brown-stone-front house half-way
between Madison and Fourth Avenues, and directed to the third story back,
whither he was left to find his way unaccompanied. Running up the dark
stairs swiftly, with his thoughts in advance of his body, he suddenly
checked himself, uncertain as to which floor he had attained. At a
hazard, he knocked on the door at the back of the dim, narrow passage he
was in. He heard slow steps upon the carpet, the door opened, and a man
slightly taller, thinner, and older than himself peered out.

"Pardon me, I may have mistaken the floor," said Larcher. "I'm looking
for Mr. Murray Davenport."

"'Myself and misery know the man,'" replied the other, with quiet
indifference, in a gloomy but not unpleasing voice, and stepped back to