Page:Arthur Stringer - The Hand of Peril.djvu/224

 and the hat and gloves which had stood beside it.

And with them, Kestner suddenly realised, Maura Lambert had once more slipped away from him.

He was not so troubled by the thought that Lambert also had made his escape. A getaway such as that was only the fortune of war, a reverse to be atoned for by other movements on other days.

But the memory of what had so recently taken place in that dingy-walled room, and the thought that now of all times he could be of help to the girl so sorely in need of that help, carried him across the room and down the many-odoured hall to the elevator.

The car rose to his floor, in response to his frantic pushes on the bell-button. A second later he was shooting down towards the office.

"Did a tall man and a girl with a leather bag go down here a moment ago?" Kestner asked the close-cropped negro-boy operating the car. That youth's heavily impersonal face lightened into sudden interest as he felt a coin pressed into his hand.

"Yas, sah, dat young woman wen' down about two minutes ago! But th' tall gen'elmun, I see him go down by th' sta'ahs, sah, on de up trip w'en de woman rung f'r me, sah!"

"Was he hurrying?"

"Yas, sah—he was trabbelin', all right!"

Kestner stepped from the elevator-car to the office-desk. A pale-eyed clerk, with a head as bare as a billiard-ball, was leisurely re-addressing a heterogeneous pile of mail-matter.

Beside this mail-matter Kestner placed a card on which he had scribbled his name and address.