Ever since the hour when he had followed the tracks in the snow between the great gateposts at Pleasantglades, and so had unearthed the crime that had been committed there, he had promised himself in his own silent way that those who had done that deed, and who had planned it and been instrumental in it, should never profit by reason of it.
There had been a time when he believed that he could convict Madge Babbington, as well as Thomas Lynne, who had actually done the murder; but that time was passed, and just now, if something heroic were not done to prevent, the woman would yet win all that she had desired in the beginning.
And so, Nick Carter, in that moment, decided that he would visit and search the apartment of Madge Babbington before she could return to it from the opera house.
That was what he had decided to do.
CHAPTER XXII.
A DARING EXPERIMENT.
To say that one will visit an apartment in a large hotel-apartment house during the absence of its owner or occupant, and search it, and to perform that ceremony are two very different propositions, as Nick Carter was destined speedily to discover.
The name of the particular one in which Madge Babbington had elected to reside after her acquittal at the trial was the Creotoria, and it was located on Broadway in that uptown section of the city where so many of those great edifices have been erected in the last few years.
It was eleven o’clock at night when the detective arrived there and entered the wide and spacious corridor which led to the office desk, and Nick found out at once that it was impossible for him to ascend to any of the upper floors of the building without first giving some adequate reason for doing so.
The obstacles which confronted him in the carrying out of his design seemed almost insurmountable at first, as he approached the desk where an expectant clerk stood waiting to receive him, having seen him enter at the front doorway—for this was no transient place, at which one might apply for lodgings for the night.
Plainly, the only way for the detective even to begin the accomplishment of what he had set out to do was to pretend that some one whom he knew lived there; but at the moment he could not recall that he had ever heard of the house until he had been informed that Mrs. Hurd-Babbington had gone there to live.