The Girl in the Mirror

by Elizabeth Garver Jordan

He awoke with a start, and in the next instant was on his feet. He had heard a sound, and now he saw a light falling from above. He looked up. A generous square opening appeared in the ceiling, and leading down from it was the gratifying vision of a small ladder. Up the ladder Laurie sprang with the swiftness of light itself. Subconsciously he realized that if he was to catch the person who had opened that door and dropped that ladder, he must be exceedingly brisk about it. But quick as he was, he was still too slow. With a grip on each side of the opening, and a strong swing, he lifted himself into the room above. As he had expected, it held no occupant. What he had not expected, and what held him staring now, was that it held not one stick of furniture.

Bare as a bone, bleak as a skeleton, it had the effect of grinning at him with Shaw's wide white grin.

His first conscious reflection was the natural one that it was not Shaw's room. He had been carried to another building. This room had a window, which, of course, might have been concealed behind the letter-files. Yet, bare as it was, it looked familiar. There was the fireplace, with its charred logs. There, yes, there were the splinters of the glass that had protected Doris's photograph. And, final convincing evidence, there, forgotten in a corner, was the worn bedroom slipper he had noticed under the couch the night before.

With eyes still bewildered, still incredulous, he stared around the empty room. Before him yawned an open door, showing an uninviting vista of dingy hall. He stepped across its threshold, and looked down the winding passage of the night before. But why hadn't he seen the door? He moved back into the empty room. A glance explained the little mystery. The room had been freshly papered, door and all. The surface of the door had been made level with the wall. When it was closed there was no apparent break in the pattern of the wall-paper.

If there had been a chair in the room, young Mr. Devon would have sat down at this point. His body wanted to sit down. In fact, it almost insisted upon doing so. But just as he was relaxing in utter bewilderment, he received another gentle shock. Above the old-fashioned mantel was a narrow, set-in mirror, and in this mirror Laurie caught a glimpse of the features of a disheveled young ruffian, staring fixedly at him. He had time to stiffen perceptibly over this vision before he realized that the disheveled ruffian was himself, a coatless, collarless self, with shirt torn open, cuffs torn off, hair on end, features battered and dirty, and bits of straw clinging to what was left of his clothing.

For a long moment Laurie gazed at the figure in the glass, and as he gazed his mingled emotions shook down into connected thought. Yes, there had been a dandy fight in this room last night, and he had the satisfaction of knowing that his two opponents must have come out of it as disheveled as himself. He had "had them going." Beyond doubt he could have handled them both but for their infernal chloroform. Again he recalled, with pleasure, the feeling of Shaw's thick, slippery neck as it choked and writhed under the grip of his fingers. Incidentally he had landed two blows on the secretary's jaw, sending him first into a corner and the next time to the floor. It was soon after the second blow that the episode of the chloroform occurred.

Straightening up, he began the hurried and elemental toilet which was all the conditions permitted. He removed the pieces of straw from his clothing, smoothed his hair, straightened his garments to conceal as much of the damage to them as possible, and gratefully put on his coat, which lay neatly folded on the floor, with his silk hat resting smugly upon it. It required some courage to go out into the clear light of a January morning in patent-leather pumps and wearing a silk hat. He would find some one around the place from whom he could borrow a hat and get the information he needed about the late tenants of this extraordinary office. He looked at his watch. It was half-past seven. He had slept later than he had realized. He had slept while Doris was in peril. The reminder both appalled and steadied him.

With a last look around the dismantled room, he closed its door behind him and went out into the winding hall. He hurried up and down its length, poking his head into empty store-rooms and dusty offices, but finding no sign of life.

At last a cheerful whistle in the lower regions drew him down a flight of stairs to what appeared to be an underground store-room. Here a bulky, overalled individual, looming large in the semi-darkness, stopped in his labor of pushing about some boxes, and regarded Laurie with surprise.

"Are you the watchman?" asked the latter, briskly.