XII
THE HORIZONTAL PANEL
Following Mrs. Sands, O'Reilly left the door between the two rooms open; but Beverley stepped quickly back and closed it.
"She's grand, the darling!" thought Clo. "Trust her to forget nothing. Her shutting that door proves how she counts on me."
The girl was deadly tired, and her head ached, yet she struggled up as the door clicked. O'Reilly had brought in her hat and dropped it on a table. There was no hat-pin, but Clo crushed the soft toque down over her masses of red hair, and hoped she was not untidy enough to be conspicuous. Unsteadily she tottered to another door—the door that led into the corridor. This faced a narrower passage to the kitchen and domestic offices of the flat. Clo would have to take that way because, if she ventured into the lift and showed herself in the hall below, the porter might take alarm. He might fear that Mrs. Sands' protégée was trying to escape for some sly purpose of her own, and refuse to let her go till he had telephoned upstairs.
In a quaint outside pocket of her new frock Clo had put the purse given her by Beverley. Through her adventures she had remembered to make sure occasionally that it had not dropped out. Now she opened the purse, selecting two ten-dollar bills and two of five dollars.
"That ought to do for 'em all," she said, "even if the lot are at home." And, money in hand, she ventured to the kitchen door. Only the chef and a woman assistant were at work.
"I'm Clo Riley, the girl Mrs. Sands has been good to," she eagerly explained. "I'm well again, and I have to go out. Mrs. Sands has a visitor, and I don't like to disturb them. Will you let me down your way?" So speaking she laid a ten-dollar bill and a five-dollar bill side by side on a table. She made no reference to the money, nor any gesture indicating it; nor did the others appear to see it.
The chef escorted her in silence to the servants' elevator. There was a button to push, and down the girl went, rejoiced at passing another stage of her journey. Five minutes more, and she was in a taxi, tearing back to the Dietz Hotel.
This time she marched boldly to a lift in a long row of half a dozen. "Fifteenth floor, please," she said, as if she owned the hotel; and was taken up without question. "Thanks to my swell clothes!" she thought. "Not far would I get in this place if I had on my old black!"