Two Flights Up by Mary Roberts Rinehart

her. “Perhaps it’s like a lot of things, pleasanter to remember than to go through with.”
    “Can you beat that!” she inquired of nobody in particular. “I’ll take to remembering when I’m too old for anything else.”
    Like the cashier at the Red Rose, she found him attractive and strongly male. “He mayn’t be much of a salesman,” she said once or twice, “but believe me, he’s some man.”
    He never flirted with her, but he knew she had a good hard brain and an amazing memory. So that morning it was to her he went for information.
    “Put away your book,” he said. “I’m not going to give you any letters. I want some information. Do you remember when a man named Bayne got in trouble at the Harrison Bank?”
    “Do I remember the San Francisco earthquake! Sure I do.” She hedged on that, however. “I was only a kid at the time, but I remember it, all right. Our landlord lost a lot of money, and Ma threw a celebration that night.”
    However, bit by bit out of a mass of extraneous material, he dug out the story. Bayne had tried to make a get-away, but had failed; he had spent a good bit, but some of it had never been accounted for.
    “Maybe he speculated,” she said, with a glance at the swinging doors and the group beyond them. “Everybody’s doing it.”
    He had not left the office more than five minutes when they came after him.
    “How should I know where he’s gone?” Miss Sharp said, eying the detective shrewdly. She hardly needed the sight of the badge to “put her wise,” she said later.
    “But you’re expecting him back this morning?”
    “Depends on how far he’s gone,” she told him. “What’s he been doing? Bootlegging, or dodging his income tax?”
    “Wait until he comes back and you’ll find out.”
    She was curious but unanxious.
    But as luck would have it, Warrington did not go back. He went around to see a certain young man, the only attorney he knew in the city, for he needed advice, and he trusted Meyer’s discretion. Meyer, however, was arguing a case at the Courthouse, and after waiting an hour for him, he gave up and went away.
    Save for a sense of inner urgency, there seemed to be no immediate danger. He decided to think the matter over, and having a prospective customer out of town, he took an inter-urban car and proceeded half-heartedly to the day’s work.
    It is rather interesting to note that had he taken a train instead, he would have been under arrest before he knew it. As things were, however, he sat safely enough in the street car, a big, heavy-shouldered young man, much like any other big and heavy-shouldered young man, save perhaps for a slightly dogged look about his mouth and chin and a certain grave directness in his eyes. And after a while he resolutely put the Baynes, including Holly, out of his mind and concentrated on the business before him.
    He sold five bonds, which netted him the munificent sum of ten dollars. But before he did it, he had to lunch with the buyer and stop in to see his family.
    “Do you good,” said the customer. “You fellows who sell bonds ought to see what it’s all about. I buy bonds to protect my family. So does everybody else. If I wanted to make money, I’d buy stocks.”
    Not important, all this, save that it made him very late getting back to the city, and that it sent him back rather thoughtful. Whether a fellow sold bonds or bought them, he ought to be working for somebody besides himself.
    He drew a long breath, as he sat in the car, and then stirred impatiently. He could see Holly as she had been that morning in the lower hall, thin and wretched; and he could see Margaret Cox, at the end of her rope too, lying down on the kitchen floor to end everything in one last desperate gesture.
    But Margaret hadn’t. She had had the courage to pull out and to take happiness where she found it. He did not for a moment believe that Holly would.
    Once in the city again, however, his mind returned to the suitcase. He