The Secret Mark / An Adventure Story for Girls

E-text prepared by Stephen Hutcheson, Rod Crawford, Dave Morgan, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)
Adventure Stories for Girls
By ROY J. SNELL
The Reilly & Lee Co. Chicago
Printed in the United States of America
Copyright, 1923 by The Reilly & Lee Co. All Rights Reserved
Lucile Tucker’s slim, tapered fingers trembled slightly as she rested them against a steel-framed bookcase. She had paused to steady her shaken nerves, to collect her wits, to determine what her next move should be.
“Who can it be?” her madly thumping heart kept asking her.
And, indeed, who, besides herself, could be in the book stacks at this hour of the night?
About her, ranging tier on tier, towering from floor to ceiling, were books, thousands on thousands of books. The two floors above were full of books. The two below were the same. This place was a perfect maze of books. It was one of the sections of a great library, the library of one of the finest universities of the United States.
In all this vast “city of books” she had thought herself quite alone.
It was a ghostly hour. Midnight. In the towers the great clock had slowly struck. Besides the striking of the clock there had been but a single sound: the click of an electric light snapped on. There had instantly gleamed at her feet a single ray of light. That light had traveled beneath many tiers of books to reach her. She thought it must be four but was not quite sure.