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disturbed.  Besides, nobody was going to break in just to steal a pack of cigarettes.  He was letting his imagination get out of hand.
    He had been up too long and too much had happened—that was all.  He was getting punchy.  Probably he had taken the third pack out himself and simply forgotten it somewhere, except that that was the sort of thing he never did.
    But it was a day for doing things he never did.  It wasn’t too much to believe that he had simply mislaid a pack of cigarettes.
    He opened the pack in his hand, shook one out and lit it.  Almost at once he felt better.
    “Watch yourself, Phil,” he thought.  “People get peculiar ideas when they’re all by themselves.”
    He decided he would take his ashtray and his cigarettes, go downstairs to the big room, where there was probably a sofa under one of those dustcloths, and spend an hour or two thinking about that waitress.  Maybe she was divorced, just like him.  It stood to reason, since she wasn’t wearing a ring and a woman who looked like that wasn’t going to be suffered to run around loose forever.  He would plan his campaign.
    By eleven o’clock he began to feel that it might be worth the trouble of going to bed.  He went back upstairs and, in conformity to habits acquired during his time as Peggy’s husband, undressed in the dark.
    He lay down, staring up at a ceiling that was lost in the gloom, too tired to think, awake but hardly aware of it.  He seemed to float out of himself, as if his weariness belonged to someone else.  It was a delicious sensation to feel his mind blurring into unconsciousness.
    Perhaps he did sleep.  Yet suddenly he was stark awake, and listening.  He could feel his heart pounding and noted, with something like surprise, that he was frightened.
    What was it?  He had no idea of the time and would not have dared to turn on the lamp on his night table to look.  He did not move.  He tried to breathe as quietly as he could, as if to disguise the fact of his existence.
    And then he heard it.  Directly over his head—it must have been coming from George Patchmore’s old apartment—a rhythmic sound, as if someone were up there, pacing the floor.
    But it was too quiet for that.  Even someone moving about in his stocking feet would have made a more definite sound—Phil had been up there only that afternoon, and he had heard the floorboards squeak under his own tread.  This was hardly more than a whisper, like the ghost of a sound.
    Probably it was nothing.  Old houses made noises in the night—everybody knew that.  He was letting his imagination run away with him, as if had over that business with the cigarettes.  He was scaring himself to death over trifles.  He would forget about it and go back to sleep.
    But for a long time he lay awake, listening.

     
Chapter 4
    The next morning, even before he had changed out of his pajamas, Phil went back up to the third floor for another look at the empty apartment.  It was still empty.  Nothing had been disturbed.  The floorboard still creaked heavily under his feet.  Feeling like an idiot, he went down and took his shower.  By the time he was dressed he had almost forgotten about the whole thing.
    Over a breakfast of coffee and raisin bran, he decided he would fix up the yard.  The lawns—or, more accurately, the places where he conjectured there must once have been lawns—were so overgrown they looked like rice paddies, and a day spent working out of doors, he figured, would clean out the evil humors and produce a healthier state of mind generally.
    One of the set of keys he had collected from Jack Matheny fix the padlock on the garage, and in one of the closets in the back he found a bamboo rake, a canvas tarp, various weeding tools, one of those old-fashioned hedge trimmers that work like a gigantic pair of scissors, a pole saw for cutting down tree limbs, several generations of worn-out work gloves, about four lengths of garden hose, and a push