Two Flights Up by Mary Roberts Rinehart Page A

looked at his watch. The banks were closed now, and the office soon would be. Hardly worth while going back. Perhaps he’d better go home and tell Holly what he had done—or rather had not done. He got out and walked across town, and a stray dog from somewhere picked him up and followed along.
    It was a wretched creature, emaciated and despondent, but when he stopped and tried to turn it back, it looked up at him with eyes at once so hopeful and so hungry that he finally gave up the attempt. He stopped at a dairy and bought a bottle of milk, as the best way to break its long fast, and with this in a newspaper under his arm, and the dog at his heels, reached the end of Kelsey Street.
    Later on, he was to thank this impulse for a few hours’ respite—that and his pride, perhaps. For from a block away he saw Brooks’s car in front of the house, and was not minded to pass the drawing-room door, and that gentleman inside it, with his present entourage .
    He was irritated as he turned to the right along a side street, and so along an alleyway to the gate leading into the yard of the house, irritated and depressed.
    “I’ll get out,” he told himself. “That’s what I’ll do. Get out from under. It’s only by chance I’m here anyhow. What the devil would they have done if I hadn’t turned up?”
    He slammed the gate so violently that he set the dog to shivering, and ashamed of that, he bent down and stroked its head. He felt better after that, and more gentle, as almost all do who have touched in friendliness a friendless dog. The kitchen door was unlocked, and he got a pan there and took it outside.
    “Here, old boy,” he said, and poured out the milk.
    When this Barmecide feast was over and the animal swollen to the bursting point, he put it out into the alley. But it whimpered there and scratched at the gate, and at last he let it in again. He found an old piece of carpet and placed it in a sheltered spot under the back steps, and then, and only then, he went into the house.
    As he opened the door to the hall, he saw Mrs. Bayne in the front hall with her back to him. She had drawn aside the curtain of the front door and was peering anxiously out, and as she peered, she talked to someone in the drawing room.
    “I really don’t understand it, Furness. She hardly ever goes out. And she knew I was not well. She will certainly be back soon.”
    “Don’t worry about it. I can look over the paper.”
    But she had no intention of letting him look over the paper, apparently. As Warrington went quietly up the stairs, he could still hear her plaintive, rather exasperated voice.
    “What I don’t understand,” she was saying, “is her not letting me know. I wakened up and she was gone. Just a note to say she would be back shortly. It’s so unlike her.”
    Warrington himself was somewhat puzzled but hardly anxious. He washed, and changed his collar as usual, and once he heard the front door close and went to the window to see if Brooks had gone. But his car was still outside, and across the street a stout light-stepping gentleman had just stopped to light a cigarette.
    Sometime, at some place, he had seen that same picture before. He pondered over it, gazing down thoughtfully into the street. The swift early twilight was already falling, and as he looked, the city’s nightly miracle was accomplished and the lights came on.
    But for him there was no miracle. He was thinking and watching.
    The man had gone on. Warrington reached behind him, and turned off his light-switch, and then took up his vigil once more. He was rewarded within five minutes by seeing the individual again. This time, however, he did not pass on. He presumed on the growing darkness and a dark space before the McCook house to take up a position there.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN
    M ARGARET HAD NOT BEEN in the Bayne house since her marriage.
    “It’s like this,” James had said. “If I’m not good enough for them, my wife isn’t either. Let them come to you;