We shall see what we shall see—only follow, still follow. She has turned up Broadway, and threads the great throng there with rapid glide, as street after street is passed. Ah, now we have it! She crosses—this is Eighth Street! There, in Broadway, near the corner, stands a great house, with wide-open door; the smeared and dirty lintels, the greasy latch, the wide, uncarpeted hall of which, at once reveals it to be one of those miscellaneous and incomprehensible edifices, which are not unfrequently met with on the great thoroughfare, and the uses of which are not generally more specifically known, than that they are fashionable boarding-houses.
Into this ever-gaping entrance she wheeled, and darted up the broad, uncarpeted stairway, which she continued to ascend with almost incredible ease and swiftness to the fifth story. When near the end of a long and narrow passage, she paused before one of the doors, and tapping it slightly, entered without farther ceremony.
A handsome and well-dressed woman, who was engaged in writing at a small escritoire, looked up indifferently as she entered, but the moment she caught the expression of the newcomer’s face, she sprang to her feet, throwing down the pen, and with a strangely shrill and unmusical laugh, screamed out in a most inconceivably voluble style—
“Why, I declare! Marie, what’s the matter? Your eyes are almost bursting out of your head! You look as if you had found a bag of gold, and meant to give me half! Why, bless the woman, how she looks! Have you caught him at last? Well, we’re in luck! I’ve caught my man for sure! He’s been here all the morning, he’s just left! Why, how the woman looks! She keeps staring so! You haven’t gone crazy for joy, have you? Now, do tell! how have you managed to catch that insolent baby, you seemed to have set your heart on so? Why, how muddy the woman is!” she shrieked, looking down at the condition of her dress. “Ha! ha! ha! ha! Do tell, what sort of a game have you been playing? Did you have to hunt him through a pig-sty?”
The woman had been standing motionless, in the meantime, with distended eyes and compressed mouth, stretched in a rigid smile of supernaturally savage exultation. She gazed towards the face of the speaker, but did not seem to listen to her, or see her features. She looked the abstracted embodiment of triumphing evil. Very soon her stiffened lips quivered slightly, while the voluble lady stepping forward, shook her sharply by the shoulder, shrilling out again—
“Do look at the woman! Why, what can be the matter? Can’t you talk? The cat’s got the woman’s tongue surely! I did not think you were so much in earnest about that green boy! Why, I could twist him about my finger like a tow-string! I have achieved something in conquering my man!”
“Y-your man!” said the woman slowly, interrupting her. But these words were accompanied by a look of such strange and taunting significance, that the other turned instantly pale and sprang back, as if she had received an electric shock from those singular eyes, that fell upon her for a moment with their evil obliquity, and then returned instantly to their natural expression. “Wh-why, what do you mean?” stammered the other angrily.
The woman only answered with a pleasant smile—“Now don’t be a jealous fool, Jeannette Shrewell—I shall never interfere with your schemes if you don’t with mine.”
“Yes! but because you knew Edmond long ago,” continued the other in a fierce and shrewish voice, “you dare to insinuate to me that he too has passed through your hands!”
The woman broke out into a loud laugh—“Why, what a child you are! You know what my relations to Edmond are, perfectly. Spiritual—purely and spotlessly spiritual. I should no more think of him than of my grandfather.”