Hurriedly her eye swept the room. The child was gone!
There remained now not one particle of doubt in her mind. “She took it,” she whispered. “I wonder why.”
Instantly her mind was in a commotion. Should she tell what she knew? At first she thought she ought, yet deliberation led to silence, for, after all, what did she know? She had not seen the child take the book. She had seen her in the room, that was all.
And now the librarian, sauntering past the case, noted the loss. The color left her face, but that was all. If anything, her actions were more deliberate than before. Gliding to a desk, she pressed a button. The next moment a man appeared. She spoke a few words. Her tone was low, her lips steady. The man sauntered by the case, glanced about the room, then walked out of the door. Not a word, not an outcry. A book worth thousands had vanished.
Yet as she left the library, Florence felt how impossible it would have been for her to have carried that book with her. She passed four eagle-eyed men before she reached the outside door and each one searched her from head to foot quite as thoroughly as an X-ray might have done.
“All the same,” she breathed, as she reached the cool, damp outer air of night, “the bird has flown, your Portland chart book is gone, for the time at least.
“Question is,” she told herself, “what am I going to do about it?”
CHAPTER VIII
WHAT WAS IN THE PAPIER-MACHE LUNCH BOX
“We can tell whether she really took it,” said Lucile after listening to Florence’s story of her strange experiences in the Portland chart room of the famous old library. “We’ll go back to Tyler street and look in at the window with the torn shade. If she took it, it’s sure to be in the empty space in the book-shelf. Looks like he was trying to fill that space.”
“He’s awfully particular about how it’s filled,” laughed Florence. “He might pick up enough old books in a secondhand store to fill the whole space and not spend more than a dollar.”