It was as if some phantom hand were in control. Darkness and silence rendered it more spectral. The ever increasing speed shot terror to her very heart. Sudden as had been the start, so sudden was the stop.
Thrown to the floor and all but knocked unconscious, she slowly struggled to her feet. What did it mean? What was to be the end of this terrible adventure?
As she looked before her she saw that the car had stopped about three feet above some floor. The doors to that floor were shut. The catches, however, were within her reach. Should she attempt to open them and make a leap for it?
Had she but known it, those doors were supposed to open only when the cage was level with the floor. But the infinite power that tempers the wind to the shorn lamb sometimes tampers with man-made doors. As if by magic, the doors swung back at her touch and with a leap she was out and away.
Then, gripping her madly beating heart, she paused to consider. She was free from the elevator, but where was she? Her situation seemed more desperate than before. She had not counted the floors that sped by her. She did not know whether she was on the sixth or the tenth floor.
Reason was beginning to come into its own. With a steadier stride she took a turn about the place. Putting out a hand, she touched first this object, then that.
“Furniture,” she said at last. “Now on what floor is furniture sold?”
She did not know.
Coming at last to a great overstuffed davenport, she sat down upon it. Feeling its drowsy comfort after her hot race, she was half tempted to stretch herself out upon it, to spread the splendid cape over her, and thus to spend the night.
“It won’t do,” she decided resolutely. “Every extra moment I spend here makes it worse.”