A sort of atmosphere of blankness saturated the gloom.
“Is there another stair?” he asked.
“Yes; it goes from the other passage. It’s the staircase to No. 5. I think—indeed I’m sure—that we have come up the stairs of No. 6 with the keys of No. 5.”
“I have never know that there was another stair,” he declared. “If you had say that before I—” then a fresh thought led him to interrupt himself. “It is a fate that leads us. We must go to the street again, and we shall go to the American Bar and talk there.”
The “American Bar” is the name which the Hotel Vierjahreszeiten has elected to give to a small and curious restaurant situated in its basement. There is nothing against the “American Bar” except its name, which naturally leads American women to avoid it.
“I don’t want to go anywhere,” said Rosina, drawing the keys into her hand; “it is no use. We are both all used up. I want to get home. And I couldn’t go anywhere if I wanted to in this skirt.”
“It is always that skirt,” he cried angrily; “that my heart breaks to-night is nothing,—only ever I must hear of your skirt.”
“Oh, where are the matches?” she said nervously; “we must find them somehow.”
He stooped to institute another search, and the umbrella slipped from his hand; it struck the floor with a noise that echoed from the attic to the cellar.
“Oh!” she gasped sharply; “we shall wake every one in the building before we get through.”