“Did you hear what the child said, that she’d rather die than steal?”
“Wonder what she calls the taking of our Shakespeare?”
“That’s part of our problem. Continued in our next,” smiled Lucile.
She set the dilapidated papier-mache lunch box which she had picked up in the street after the child had dropped it, in the corner beneath the cloak rack. Before she fell asleep she thought of it and wondered what had been thumping round inside of it.
“Probably just an old, dried-up sandwich,” she told herself. “Anyway, I’m too weary to get up and look now. I’ll look in the morning.”
One other thought entered her consciousness before she fell asleep. Or was it a thought? Perhaps just one or two mental pictures. The buildings, the street, the electric signs that had encountered her gaze as they first saw the child and the half-drunk woman passed before her mind’s eye. Then, almost instantly, the picture of the street on which the building in which Frank Morrow’s book shop was located flashed before her.
“That’s queer!” she murmured. “I do believe they were the same!”
“And indeed,” she thought dreamily, “why should they not be? They are both down in the heart of the city and I am forever losing my sense of location down there.”
At that she fell asleep.