The morning was yet early, there was quiet in the street and Van Vernet, wearing for convenience sake the uniform of a policeman, paced slowly down toward the house of mourning. As he neared the street-corner, two women, beggars evidently, came hurrying around the corner straight toward him.
At sight of his uniform the larger and elder of the two, a stout woman with a vicious face, a sharp eye, and head closely muffled in a ragged shawl, started slightly. Then with a furtive glance and a fawning obeisance, she hurried her companion past him, and down the street.
This companion, a younger woman, her face covered with bruises and red with dissipation, walked with a painful limp, and the hesitating air of the blind, her eyes tightly shut and the lids quivering.
“Playing blind,” muttered Vernet, as they hastened past him. “If I were the regular officer here, I’d have them out of this; as it is—”
He gave a shrug of indifference and glanced back over his shoulder.
The two women had halted before the Warburton mansion, and the elder one was looking up at the crape-adorned door.
Then she glanced backward toward the officer, who seemed busy contemplating the antics of a pair of restive horses that were coming down the street. Seeing him thus employed, she darted down the basement-stairs, dragging her stumbling companion after her.
Suddenly losing his interest in the prancing horses, Van Vernet turned and hastily approached the mansion, screened from the view of the two women by the massive stone steps.
Even a beggar, of the ordinary type, respects the house of mourning. And as he drew near them, Vernet mentally assured himself that these were no ordinary mendicants.
They were standing close to the basement-entrance. And as he stealthily approached, he saw that the elder woman put into the hand of the servant, who had opened the door, a folded paper which she took reluctantly, glanced down at, and with a sullen nod put into the pocket of her apron. Then, without a word to the two beggars, she closed and locked the door, while they, seeming not in the least disconcerted, turned and moved leisurely up the basement-stairs.