“Laurie Seymour,” she breathed.
Laurie was the new man in the department. He had been working at the boys’ and girls’ books for only three days, yet Lucile liked him, liked him tremendously. He was so friendly, even-tempered and different. And he seemed a trifle mysterious.
“Mysterious,” she mused, “perhaps here’s the mystery answered.”
It certainly did seem so, for after the apparition in white had whispered a word or two, Laurie looked at her strangely for a second, drew from his pocket a slip of paper and handing it to her, quickly vanished into the shadows. The next instant the apparition vanished, too. Again Lucile found herself alone in the far corner of the mammoth store, surrounded by darkness.
Perhaps you have been wondering what Lucile and Laurie were doing in the great store at this hour. Since the doors are closed at six o’clock, you have no doubt thought of the entire place as being shrouded in darkness and utterly deserted. These were the days of the great rush of sales that comes before Christmas. That evening eight thousand books had been trucked into the department to be stowed away on or under tables and shelves. Twenty sales persons had been given “pass outs”; which meant that they might pass in at seven o’clock and work until ten. They had worked like beavers; making ready for the rush that would come on the morrow.
Now the great bulk of the work had been done. More than half of the workers had chirped a cheery “Good-night” and had found their way down a marble stairway to the ground floor and the street. Lucile had been sent by “Rennie,” the head sales-lady of juveniles, to this dark section for an armful of books. Here in this dark corner a part of Laurie’s true character had, uninvited, come to her.
“He gave her his pass-out,” she said to herself. “With that she can leave the building with her stolen goods.”
For a second, as she thought of this, she contemplated following the mystery woman and bringing her back.
“But that,” she told herself, “would be dangerous. That passage is a hundred feet long and only four feet wide; then it turns sharply and goes two hundred feet farther. She may carry a knife; such women do. In that place she could murder me and no one would know until morning.
“Of course,” she reflected, “there’s the other end of the passage where it comes out at the offices. She must leave the passage there if she does not come back this way. I might call the watchmen. They could catch her. It’s a perfect trap; she’s like a mouse in a boot. But then—”