The city received her with a deafening roar that seemed of exultation that its prey had been delivered unto it again.
The heat was even more oppressive than that of the day on which she had left--or perhaps seemed so by contrast with the radiant coolness of the Island air.
Avoiding Park Avenue, she sought the place that she called home by way of Lexington.
She went slowly, wearily, lugging her half-empty hand-hag as if it were a heavy burden.
At length, leaving the avenue, she paused a few doors west of the corner, climbed the weather-bitten steps to the brownstone entrance, and addressed herself to those three long flights of naked stairs.
The studio door at the top was closed and locked. The card had been torn from the tacks that held it to the panel.
Puzzled and anxious, she stopped and turned up a corner of the worn fibre mat--and sighed with relief to find the key in its traditional hiding-place.
But when she let herself in, it was to a room tenanted solely by seven howling devils of desolation.
Only the decrepit furniture remained; it had not been worth cartage or storage; every personal belonging of the other two girls had disappeared; Mary Warden had not left so much as a sheet of music, Lucy Spade had overlooked not so much as a hopeless sketch.
Yet Sally had no cause for complaint; they had forsaken her less indifferently than she had them; one or the other had left a newspaper, now three days old, propped up where she could not fail to see it on the antiquated marble mantel-shelf. In separate columns on the page folded outermost two items were encircled with rings of crimson water-colour.