"It had better be good this time," he muttered, with his eyes on the pavement. "I'll strangle him if it ain't."
He tossed up his head and sent a fierce and frowning glance through one of the great plates of French glass that shut in the court. His eye darted forward on its own level, but it saw nothing save McDowell in his office, ten or twelve floors above.
Most of the panes that enclosed this central space were of great height and breadth, and were lettered with the silvered styles and titles of various railroad and mining companies; others, smaller, gave light and some ventilation to a few booth-like shops; a few others, immovable half-lights, admitted a little daylight and no air at all to certain closet-like crannies that had a squeezed and crowded rôle in the Clifton's general economy. One of these last looked out from under a kind of secondary stairway; it lighted the scullery of the Acme Lunch Room, and it commanded a view of that side of the court on which Vibert was standing.
Vibert's heel gave a vicious dig into the mosaic pavement and made a quick and rasping turn towards the exit; he crossed the court with a heavy yet rapid stride, and passed out into the street. He was quite unconscious of observation, but he had been seen.
Through the half-pane under the stairway a young woman had noted his presence and witnessed his departure. She was a thin, faded creature, in the forlorn garments of an undisguisable poverty. All but the faintest traces of good looks seemed to have been taken from her by a long experience with illness and suffering. She stood close against the pane. Her thin fingers, red and chapped, showed, as they pressed against the glass, the crinkled puffiness that comes from long immersion in hot water, and she stared through with a look of mingled fear, entreaty, and agony. At the glance which Vibert's indignation over McDowell's trickery sent in her direction, she started and cowered like one who had encountered that glance before; and when he turned to go she recovered herself, and flung her bosom and her hands against the pane as if bent upon breaking through and following him.
A moment later she appeared in the court; she had put on a shabby hat and a flimsy, faded shawl. She crossed over hastily, and approached the head of the elevator squad.
"The tall, dark man who just went out—you saw him?" she inquired hurriedly. She spoke in two quick-expulsions of the breath, and seemed left without a third.
"Um?" The man opposed his gold band and gilt buttons to her forlorn and bedraggled shabbiness. His brief inquiry, made without opening his lips, had the true official indifference; but it caused his questioner to feel some of the disadvantage that comes to a young woman from a public and impulsive inquiry after a young man.
"You saw him standing over there; he had a paper in his hand. Tell me, does he work in this building?" She was panting and all a-tremble, but she found breath for these words and will to use it.
"Yes, I saw him," the man answered, with the slow reluctance of his kind to be interested in individuals as individuals. "Used to work here, I believe. Haven't seen much of him lately."