“Say no more, young man!” Miss Withers took her departure, but she was only halfway down the stairs when she heard the sound of young, impetuous feet, and Inga came up beside her wearing a raincoat.

“I’ll walk with you as far as the corner,” the girl offered. “I want to apologize for the way I talked when you first came in, and anyway I want to bring back some ice cream. Tommy loves gelati—that’s the Italian ice cream that’s so crisp and creamy.”

The schoolteacher, a little touched, said that was all right. “Why didn’t Tommy come too?”

“I set him to washing dishes,” Inga confided. “You’ve got to get a man trained early the right way, I always say.”

They walked on, and said another goodbye outside the little Neapolitan confectionery on the corner of the Square. “Be happy, my child,” said Miss Withers. “You’ve had a very narrow escape.”

Inga nodded slowly. “But I still can’t believe Mr. Wayland did it! He was such a gentleman—and he wasn’t the type!”

Miss Withers rode on uptown, then took the shuttle to Fifth and climbed aboard a north-bound bus. She got off at Sixty-fourth and walked east, wondering just what type George Wayland really was, and how he would receive her. The whole thing, as it turned out, was ridiculously easy, almost too easy in fact. Wayland himself answered the door when she rang the bell of the neat four-story brownstone, and seemed to have no reluctance whatever about showing the house to a prospective buyer with a very weak story.

His smile was easy and warming. Miss Withers guessed that he was around thirty-five, a little on the plump side but well-tanned and dressed with extreme neatness. He might easily have been the man behind the railing in her bank, the vestryman at church, or the one who helped her with her bundles on a Pullman.

Wayland talked a good deal, and a little fast, but that might or might not be a sign of nervousness. “Here’s the living room,” he was saying. “The furniture’s for sale too, if you’re interested.”

Miss Withers was emphatically not interested in Italian Rennaissance with all its dust-catching heavy carvings, but she nodded pleasantly. The downstairs rooms all seemed furnished with more money than taste, the pictures being reproductions of such traditional works of art as The Blue Boy, Age of Innocence, and The Horse Fair. There were few books, and those were sets of Victorian novelists, in very good bindings.

On the second floor he displayed two front bedrooms, one obviously his own for there was an expensive leather toilet kit on the chest of drawers, silver brushes, and numerous bottles of cologne and shaving lotion nearby, and a heavy silk dressing-gown on the bed. Wayland led the way toward the rear, where one doorway gaped wide like a missing tooth.