The guard made no reply. He merely shrugged and smiled.
Dropping back a step or two, Lucile stood staring at the curtain. Her head was whirling. What a strangely privileged woman this one must be. She entered and left a great department store at two hours before midnight, and no one said to her “No.” She steps into a vestibule of a great musical hall and passes behind the curtain without a pass. What would she do next?
Suspended from one brass post to another, a heavy silk rope hung before the curtain. There were gaps in the curtain. Through one of these gaps, as Lucile stood staring at it, a hand was thrust. It was the hand of the mysterious lady. And upon it, beside the dragon’s head ring, was another. And this ring one more unusual and startling than the other. It was the iron ring of a bundle wrapper!
“Cordie’s ring,” Lucile whispered, “and, as I live, a diamond has been set in it. A magnificent diamond, worth hundreds of dollars! How strange! How weird! A diamond set in iron!”
Even as she thought this, the hand disappeared. Instantly the heavy purple curtain began to sway. Expecting anything, the girl stood there breathless. A needle flashed twice through the cloth of the curtain, then in its place there appeared a tiny spot of crimson.
“The crimson thread!” Lucile whispered. “And I may not pass beyond the curtain!”
CHAPTER VIII
THE DIAMOND-SET IRON RING
When Cordie fled from the man of the hawk-like eye and the marble features she dashed directly into the moving throng of shoppers. In this, however, she found scant relief. No matter which way she might turn she felt sure that the man pursued her and would overtake her if she did not flee faster and faster.
Putting her utmost strength into this flight, she dashed past counters strewn with goods, round a bank of elevators, through narrow aisles jammed with shoppers, across a narrow court and again into the throng. At last, in utter desperation, she fled down a stairway; then another and another. Little dreaming that she had been descending into the very depths of the earth, she came up at last with a little suppressed scream to a place where from out a long row of small iron doors fire gleamed red as a noonday sun.
Where was she? Surely she had not dreamed there could be such a place as this in a great department store.