permit Clancy to pack. Clancy was a good girl to worry so about her mother. She must sit still and drink the coffee that Paul was fetching. Madame Napoli would pack her bag. And madame had sent for a taxi.

[Pg 55]

It was all very easy. Without arousing the slightest suspicion, Clancy left the Napoli.

She told the driver to take her to the Grand Central Station. There she checked her valise. For she was not running back to Zenith. No, indeed! She'd come to New York to succeed, and she would succeed. Truth must prevail, and, sooner or later, the murderer of Morris Beiner would be apprehended. Then—Clancy would be free to go about the making of her career. But now, safety was her only thought. But safety in Zenith was not what she sought.

In the waiting-room she purchased a newspaper. She found a list of lodging-houses advertised there. Inquiry at the information-desk helped her to orientate herself. She wished to be settled some distance from Times Square. She learned that Washington Square was a couple of miles from the Napoli. Two miles seemed a long distance to Clancy.

She reacquired her valise, got another taxi, and shortly had engaged a room in the lodging-house of Mrs. Simon Gerand, on Washington Square South. Mrs. Gerand was not at all like Madame Napoli, save in one respect—she demanded her rent in advance. Clancy paid her. She noted that she had only seven dollars left in her purse. So, in her room, she took out her check-book and wrote her first check, payable to "self," for twenty-five dollars. She'd take a 'bus, one of those that she could see from her tiny room on the square below, ride to Forty-second Street,[Pg 56] cross to the Thespian Bank. No, she wouldn't; she might be seen. She'd ask Mrs. Gerand to cash her check.

[Pg 56]

She sat suddenly down upon a shabby chair. She couldn't cash her check, for Florine Ladue could be traced through her bank-account as well as through any other way!

She rose and walked to the window. It was a different view from that which she had had at the Napoli. She might be in another country. Across the park stood solid-looking mansions that even the untutored eyes of Clancy knew were inhabited by a different class of people than lived at Mrs. Gerand's. The well-keptness of the houses reminded her of a well-dressed woman drawing aside her skirts as the wheel of a carriage, spattering mud, approached too closely. She did not know that an 

 Prev. P 40/222 next