What was a fellow, who would work under a Dutchman like Kling, for only enough to pay his board, doing with a dress suit, anyhow?
The fact was that O'Day was either here "on the quiet" to escape his creditors, while his friends were trying to patch things up for his return, or he was an English valet who had stolen his master's clothes.
A new rumor now filled the air.

O'Day, was a spy sent by some foreign government to look after important interests, like that Russian who had been employed in a publishing house, where he wrote articles for an encyclopaedia, only to be recognized later, whereupon he had disappeared and was never seen again.

Tim Kelsey had known him.

In fact, he had visited often Tim's bookstore at night, just as O'Day was visiting it, and where a lot of other queer-looking people could be found if anybody would "take the trouble to knock at Kelsey's door and peer in through the tobacco smoke some night." All this gossip rolled off Kitty's mind as rain from a tin roof.

Only once did she rise up in anger with a "Get out of my place! I'll not have ye soiling the air with yer dirty talk.