"How do you know, sir?"
"It has a little love message on it."
"Hum! Ha!" Dunwoodie barked. "Come to my office to-morrow. Come before
ten."
Dreamily Jones tilted his hat. "I am not up before ten. Where do you
live? In the Roaring Forties?"
But, in the mounting clamour, the answer, if answer there were, was
submerged. Jones went out to the street, entered a taxi, gave an address
and sailed away, up and across the Park, along the Riverside and into
the longest thoroughfare--caravan routes excepted--on the planet.
On a corner was a drug-shop, where anything was to be had, even to
umbrellas and, from a sign that hung there, apparently a notary public
also. Opposite was a saloon, the Ladies Entrance horribly hospitable.
Jones' trained eye--the eye of a novelist--gathered these things which
it dropped in that bag which the subconscious is. Meanwhile the car,
scattering children, tooted, turned and stopped before a leprous door.
In the hall, a girl of twelve, with the face of a seraph, and the voice
of a fiend, was shrieking at a switchboard. Jones fearing, if he
addressed her, that she might curse him, went on and up, higher, still
higher, and began to feel quite birdlike. On the successive landings
were doors and he wondered what tragedies, what comedies, what aims,
lofty, mean or merely diabolic, they concealed. They were all labelled
with names, Hun or Hebrew, usually both. But one name differed. It
caressed.
There he rang.
When it opened, a strawberry mouth opened also. "Oh!" Cassy's blue eyes
were red. There was fright in them. "It is horrible! Tell me, do you
think it was he?"