The thought stung me upright. Of course, if her story was a lie, she herself had written the note. Had Godfrey thought of that? Or was it Godfrey who was trying to throw dust in my eyes?
CHAPTER II
It was raining when I left my apartment at the Marathon that night—a cold and disagreeable drizzle—and the thought occurred to me as I turned up my coat collar and stepped into the cab I had summoned, that it was a somewhat foolhardy thing to be driving about the streets of New York with fifty thousand dollars in my hand bag. I glanced at the lights of the Tenderloin police station, just across the street, and thought for an instant of going over and asking for an escort. Then I sank back into the seat with a little laugh at my own nervousness.
"One-twenty West Twenty-third," I said, as the cabman slammed the apron shut.
He nodded, spoke to his horse, and we were off.
The asphalt was gleaming with the rain, and a thin fog was in the air, which formed a nimbus around the street lamps and drew a veil before the shop windows. Far away I heard the rattle of the elevated and the never-ceasing hum of Sixth Avenue and Broadway, but, save for these reminders of the city's life, the silence of the street was broken only by the click-clack of our horse's hoofs.
We swung sharply around a corner, and then another. A moment later the cab drew up at the curb, and the driver sprang from his box.
"Here we are, sir," he said, and as I stepped to the pavement, I saw the old Magnus house frowning down upon me.
I had never before seen it at night, and for the first time I really appreciated its gloomy situation. In its day it had been part of a fashionable residential district, of which it was now the only survival. It was of brownstone, with a flight of steps mounting steeply to the door, and stood back from the street at the bottom of a cañon formed by the towering walls of the adjacent office buildings. Why any woman who could afford to live where she chose should choose to live here was a riddle past my solving.
Musing over this, I mounted the steps and rang the bell.