He stopped the car, and she got out and peered through a spyhole beside the lock.

“He ain’t in,” she said. “His motorcycle ain’t here.”

“What’s us going to do?” he said.

“Let me think,” she said, putting the tips of her mittened fingers to a dusty gray cheek and looking absent. “Oh!” she said brightly. “That reminds me. He gave me a key to the door.”

She started digging in her handbag.

“What’s he doing giving you a key to his door?” he asked suspiciously.

“It’s for his girl friend,” she said lightly. “She and I is pals. And he said if she come by and he was out for me to let her in.”

To the right of the carriage-house doors was a small door that opened on to a staircase leading to the quarters above. She inserted a key in the Yale lock and said, “There! Now we can just go inside and wait for him.”

“You know this man mighty well,” he said.

“His girl friend and me is just like that,” she said, holding up a hand with the thumb pressed tightly to the first mittened finger. “I’ll just run up and get the key to the big lock so you can put the car inside where won’t nobody see it.”

“If I likes this, I likes oats in my ice cream,” he said. “And I ain’t no mule.”

But she didn’t wait to hear him. She ran up, got the key and opened the big doors, and he maneuvered the car into a dark, damp room with bare beams and a flagstoned floor smelling of tire rubber and earth mold. Hanging to toolboards on the walls were the various equipment for changing and repairing tires, but no tires were in sight.

He got out, grumbling to himself. She closed and locked the gate, switching about with a bright, excited insouciance, as though her pants were crawling with seventeen thousand queen ants.

“Now we’ll just go upstairs and wait,” she said, moving as though all the ants were biting her lightly.

The upstairs was one room. There were sets of windows at both back and front, the panes covered with oiled brown paper. In the center, on one side, was a coal-burning, pot-bellied stove. The nearest corner was filled by a double bed with a chipped, white-enameled iron frame. The opposite corner was curtained off for a clothes closet. On the other side of the stove was a chest of drawers with a cracked marble top, on which sat a two-burner gas plate. A square table with dirty dishes occupied the center of the floor. Before the inside windows was a third table with a cracked white porcelain washbowl and pitcher. Water was supplied by a hose coming from a single tap at the level of the baseboards. The toilet was outside, behind the carriage house. The only covering for the bare wooden floor was a variety of men’s garments.

In addition to a single drop light in the center of the room, hanging from one of the uncovered beams were several tiny wall lamps from the ten-cent stores.