"My God!" she said. "I thought you were dead!"

"I'm afraid you're mistaking me for some one else, aren't you?"

She looked at him carefully.

"I'd have sworn--" she muttered, and turning to the button inside the
door she switched on the light. Then she surveyed him again.

"What's your name?"

"Livingstone. Doctor Livingstone. I called--"

"Is that for me, or for the police?"

"Now see here," he said pleasantly. "I don't know who you are mistaking
me for, and I'm not hiding from the police. Here's my card, and I
have come from the family of a young man named Wheeler, who was killed
recently in an automobile accident."

She took the card and read it, and then resumed her intent scrutiny of
him.

"Well, you fooled me all right," she said at last. "I thought you
were--well, never mind that. What about this Wheeler family? Are they
going to settle with the undertaker? Because I tell you flat, I can't
and won't. She owed me a month's rent, and her clothes won't bring over
seventy-five or a hundred dollars."

As he left he was aware that she stood in the doorway looking after
him. He drove home slowly in the car, and on the way he made up a kindly
story to tell the family. He could not let them know that Jim had been
seeking love in the byways of life. And that night he mailed a check in
payment of the undertaker's bill, carefully leaving the stub empty.