"If I'm disturbed again on that woman's account for anything less than murder—"
"Yesm'm?"
"Well, there'll be one, that's all. Good night."
Such had been Monday's cheerful close.
Martha Foote sat up in bed, now, preparatory to the heroic flinging aside of the covers. "No," she assured herself, "it can't be as bad as yesterday." She reached round and about her pillow, groping for the recalcitrant hairpin that always slipped out during the night; found it, and twisted her hair into a hard bathtub bun.
With a jangle that tore through her half-wakened senses the telephone at her bedside shrilled into life. Martha Foote, hairpin in mouth, turned and eyed it, speculatively, fearfully. It shrilled on in her very face, and there seemed something taunting and vindictive about it. One long ring, followed by a short one; a long ring, a short. "Ca-a-an't it? Ca-a-an't it?"
"Something tells me I'm wrong," Martha Foote told herself, ruefully, and reached for the blatant, snarling thing.
"Yes?"
"Mrs. Foote? This is Healy, the night clerk. Say, Mrs. Foote, I think you'd better step down to six-eighteen and see what's—"
"I am wrong," said Martha Foote.