won’t beg,” the girl answered in a small but determined voice. “And I shan’t steal either. You can kill me first.”

“Well, we’ll see, my fine lady,” growled the woman.

All this time the child was being dragged forward. As she came opposite the two girls, the woman gave a harder tug than before and the girl almost fell. Something dropped to the sidewalk, but the woman did not notice it, and the child evidently did not care, for they passed on.

Lucile stooped and picked it up. It was the paper lunch box they had seen the child carrying earlier in the evening.

“Something in it,” she said, shaking it.

“Lucile,” said Florence in a tense whisper, “are we going to let that beast of a woman get that child? She doesn’t belong to her, or if she does, she oughtn’t to. I’m good for a fight.”

Lucile’s face blanched.

“Here in this city wilderness,” she breathed.

“Anywhere for the good of a child. Come on.”

Florence was away after the woman and child at a rapid rate.

“We’ll get the child free. Then we’ll get out,” breathed Florence. “We don’t want any publicity.”

Fortune favored their plan. The woman, still dragging the child, who was by now silently weeping, hurried into a narrow dismal alley.

Suddenly as she looked about at sound of a footstep behind her, she was seized in two vises and hurled by some mechanism of steel and bronze a dozen feet in air, to land in an alley doorway. At least so it seemed to her, nor was it far from the truth. For Florence’s months of gymnasium work had turned her muscles into things of steel and bronze. It was she who had seized the woman.

It was all done so swiftly that the woman had no time to cry out. When she rose to her feet, the alley was deserted. The child had fled in one direction, while the two girls had stepped quietly out into the street in the other direction and, apparently quite unperturbed, were waiting for a car.

“Look,” said Lucile, “I’ve still got it. It’s the child’s lunch basket. There’s something in it.”

“There’s our car,” said Florence in a relieved tone. The next moment they were rattling homeward.

“We solved no mystery to-night,” murmured Lucile sleepily.

“Added one more to the rest,” smiled Florence. “But now I am interested. We must see it through.”

“Did you hear what the child said, that she’d rather die than steal?”

“Wonder what she calls the taking of our Shakespeare?”

“That’s part of our problem. Continued in our next,” smiled Lucile.

She set the dilapidated papier-mache lunch box which she had picked up in the street after the child had dropped it, in the corner beneath the cloak rack. Before she fell asleep she thought of it and wondered what had been thumping round inside of it.

“Probably just an old, dried-up sandwich,” she told herself. “Anyway, I’m too weary to get up and look now. I’ll look in the morning.”

One other thought entered her consciousness before she fell asleep. Or was it a thought? Perhaps just one or two mental pictures. The buildings, the street, the electric signs that had encountered her gaze as they first saw the child and the half-drunk woman passed before her mind’s eye. Then, almost instantly, the picture of the street on which the building in which Frank Morrow’s book shop was located flashed before her.

“That’s queer!” she murmured. “I do believe they were the same!”

“And indeed,” she thought dreamily, “why should they not be? They are both down in the heart of the city and I am forever losing my sense of location down there.”

At that she fell asleep.