And if by any chance we should need to bother you again….”

“It’s no bother at all to me, but I have an idea something must be bothering you. Can’t you let me in on it?”

“No,” he said, smiling completely for the first time. He had good strong teeth and the smile made rather babyish dimples. I took off ten years from my first guess of his age; perhaps he was thirty-five.

“A secret?” I said.

“Yes.”

“Top secret?” (They like you to use their jargon.)

“Just a secret.” (Perhaps it wasn’t their jargon.)

“I see.”

I smiled back and walked towards the door. He overtook me, yet somehow without hurry, before I reached it; turning the handle, he put himself with me in the doorway. “Nice of you to come so promptly. I hope you didn’t make a special trip—any time within a few days would have been all right.”

“Oh, I go downtown quite a lot.”

“Your father’s office?”

“Oftener the Village. More in my line than Wall Street.”

“Ah yes, of course. Writers and artists.” He cupped my elbow with his hand. “I’ll have to think over your request for Brad’s address. Might be able to oblige you, though of course we’re not a bureau of missing persons…. Well, thanks again…. Good-by.”

“But he isn’t exactly missing if you know his address, is he?… Good-by, Mr. Small.”

In the elevator going down I thought I had done rather well. Or had I?… Suddenly I realized that he had called him Brad. Was that to test me? But of course I would have admitted readily enough that I used to call him Brad. Nothing significant about that. It was probably their technique—to leave you with a feeling that they know more than you think they know, so that you can chew it all over and work up a fine state of nerves afterwards.

* * * * *

I took a taxi uptown and had early dinner alone at the house. There were plenty of friends I could have called up, but I didn’t feel like making a date with anyone, or even going to a movie later on by myself. The weather was probably the last cold spell of the winter; a bitter wind swept in from the north, and ice crackled where there had been any water in the gutters. Even after a couple of cocktails the dining room looked so big and dreary I was glad to have coffee upstairs and turn on all the lights in my personal rooms. It’s a cheerful suite on the fifth floor—bedroom, bathroom, dressing room, and den; I was allotted them as a child, and have never wanted anything bigger, even when the rest of the house was free for me to choose from. The furniture is good solid stuff from either New or Old England; my mother probably bought it at the auctions she liked to frequent. And the heating vents are built in the window sills, so that you lean on them and burn your elbows if you want to look down and see what’s going on in the street. Nothing much, as a rule; those middle sixties between Park and Fifth keep pretty quiet. That evening, as I looked down, I saw the familiar steam curling out of the manholes, and from the look of it as it scurried I knew the temperature had dropped a good deal since I left the downtown office. The low sky held captive the glow of the city; anglewise across Park Avenue I could see the Rockefeller buildings lost in clouds about the thirtieth floor. John came in to pull the blinds; I told him not to bother, I would do it myself later.

“There’s still supposed to be some rule about lights,” he said.

“All right, then, pull them down.” At that stage of the war New York didn’t bother much about the partial blackout, but John’s a stickler about such things. We’ve been real friends from my childhood. My father enticed him from a duke about twenty years ago, since when he’s become naturalized, but he still calls himself English except when English visitors ask him if he is, then he says he’s American or, if further pressed, a Scot.

“Are you going out again, Miss Jane?”

“Not me, I’m off to bed soon with a good book.”

“Not Forever Amber, I hope?” He has a corny humor, unchanged from the time I was young enough to appreciate nothing else.

“No. I take my history straight. Always did, ever since I studied it in London.”

I don’t know what made me bring that up, but I realized it was the second time that day I had mentioned something that I often go months without even thinking about.

He said, as he pulled the blinds and then the curtains: “I’d like to see London again sometime.”

“You probably could, when the war’s over.”

“They say it’s considerably changed.”

“I’ll bet our part hasn’t. Hampstead Heath and round about there.”

“Several bombs fell near the house, I’ve been told,” he said thoughtfully. It was still “the house” to us both. “Can I get you anything?”

“No thanks—I’ll be asleep very soon, I’m terribly tired.