It was perhaps an hour later, or it might have been only a half, but she was on the street. She was trying to walk, but apparently she was not succeeding, for the man she had run from was supporting her. He had his arm about her waist; while his free hand held both of hers. She was not talking now. She was resting. Her neck was limp. Presently they turned into another place. She did not know where. Before them raised another flight of stairs, and up this they walked—that is, he did and almost carried her. A full minute it took before they reached the top. An old woman met them. Mildred saw her for a brief moment, and recalled that she resembled the one where she had a room.
"My wife is sick," she heard the man say, "is sick. I wish to get a room."
"His wife?" she repeated, but that was all. Darkness was all about her now; but the man repeated his words, and at the same time handed the old woman a half dollar. A moment later a door closed behind them, and the next a key turned.
But Mildred Latham didn't hear it.
The old woman looked after them a moment, as she rubbed the new coin in her palm. She raised it to her lips and kissed it with a smack. She regarded the door of the room in which they had disappeared, and then she burst into a fit of laughing.
"My wife—sick—Hell!" And went about her duties.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Midnight, December Thirty-first
Wilson Jacobs sat in his study, gazing across the room at a clock. It "tick-tocked" as it always had. The minute hand slipped from notch to notch. There was nothing whatever wrong with it. It was a good clock. As he gazed at it, he recalled that in the years it had stuck to the wall there, it had never stopped; it had never varied from standard city time more than a minute or two during those years. And yet he watched the clock as though it were something strange; something uncanny; something that spelled his end.