Frances looked at herself in the mirror, adjusting her hair, and taking note of the two little circles of scarlet that had deepened and spread across her feverish cheeks.
Then she sat down once more, and swung the hot-water bottle from her forefinger, and waited.
She heard the dull thud of the front door closing and a moment later the sound of quick footsteps on the stairs.
She looked about the comfortable, rose-tinted room, with its gilded Louis clock, with its womanish signs and tokens, with its nest-like warmth and softness; she looked about her slowly and comprehensively, as though she had been taking her last view of life.
Then she rose and went to the door, for the police had arrived.
CHAPTER XIX
Durkin was both puzzled and apprehensive. That a taxi should follow his own at eleven o’clock at night, for some twenty-odd blocks, was a singular enough coincidence. That it should stop when he stopped, that it should wait, not a square away, for him to come out of his café, and then shadow him home for another thirteen circuitous blocks, was more than a coincidence. It was a signal for the utmost discretion.
It was not that Durkin, at this stage of the kaleidoscopic game, was given to wasting tissue in unnecessary worry. But there had been that mysterious cigar-light in the hallway. When he had glanced cautiously down through the darkness, leaning well out over the bannister, he had distinctly seen the little glow of light. Yet, with the exception of his own top-floor rooms, the building was given over to business offices, and by night he had invariably found the corridors empty and unused. No Holmes watchman, no patrolman, not even a Central Office man, he knew, indulged in fragrant Carolina Perfectos when covering his beat.
But when he descended quietly to reconnoitre, he saw that no one went down to the street door. And no one, he could see equally well, remained on the stairs or in the halls, for he turned on the light, floor by floor, as he went back to his rooms.
Yet nobody, again, intelligently trying to secrete himself, would thus flaunt a lighted cigar in the darkness. From the suave and mellow odor of that cigar, too, Durkin knew that the intruder was something more than the ordinary house-thief and night-hawk.