The majesty of Death had entered unannounced, and that night, in far-away Sweden, Romaine Garland, praying for the mother whom she had recovered from Shadowland, stirred in the sleep of maidenhood to murmur, “My father!” For in the vast empyrean James Garston had found his child—at last!
A glance showed to the entrapped woman a stout partition wall leading from a window opened into a side court to the long hotel corridor on the other side.
Spurred on by a blind impulse of self-protection, Elaine Willoughby sprang lightly across the dividing wall and raised the window on the other side of the covered court.
There was no one in the silent corridor. Her beating heart told her that here was safety.
It was but the work of a moment to cast her cloak around her, and a side entrance offered her an unobserved descent to the level of the street.
“If that door should be locked!” was her heart’s wild alarm.
But no, it yielded, and then with a swift step she sped along in the storm, not daring to look behind her in the night!
The rains of heaven had cooled her brow as she halted far away before a row of carriages standing before a theater. The sleepy driver only growled “All right,” as he heard the words “Central Park West.”
He never knew that the half-fainting woman who stopped him on a corner twenty minutes later, was the one possessor of a mystery which was the sensation of the whole city next morning.
“Women are queer creatures!” babbled the sleepy driver, as he sought the nearest saloon, while his fare disappeared under the gloomy darkness of the walls of the “Circassia.”