paused. A sudden thought had flashed into her mind. At the risk of missing her quarry, she groped her way to the shelf where the companion to the stolen volume lay and took it down. Slowly she ran her fingers over the inner part of the cover.

“Yes,” she whispered, “there is something.”

She dared not flash on the light. To do so might betray her presence in the building. To-morrow she would see. Replacing the volume in its accustomed niche, she again tiptoed to her post of waiting.

As she thought of it now, she began to realize what a large part her unconscious memory had played in her longing to shield the child. She had seen the child render a service to a feeble and all but helpless old man. Her memory had been trying to tell her of this but had only now broken through into her wakeful mind. Lucile was aroused by the thought.

“I must save her,” she told herself. “I must. I must!”

Even with this resolve came a perplexing problem. Why had the child taken the book? Had she done so at the old man’s direction? That seemed incredible. Could an old man, tottering to his grave, revealing in spite of his shabby clothing a one-time more than common intellect and a breeding above the average, stoop to theft, the theft of a book? And could he, above all, induce an innocent child to join him in the deed? It was unthinkable.

“That man,” she thought to herself, “why he had a noble bearing, like a soldier, almost, certainly like a gentleman. He reminded me of that great old general of his own nation who said to his men when the enemy were all but upon Paris: ‘They must not pass.’ Could he stoop to stealing?”

These problems remained all unsolved, for on that night no slightest footfall was heard in the silent labyrinth.

The next night was the same, and the next. Lucile was growing weary, hollow-eyed with her vigil. She had told Florence nothing, yet she had surprised her roommate often looking at her in a way which said, “Why are you out so late every night? Why don’t you share things with your pal?”

And she wanted to, but something held her back.

Thursday night came with a raging torrent of rain. It was not her night at the library. She would gladly have remained in her cozy room, wrapped in a kimono, studying, yet, as the chimes pealed out the notes of Auld Lang Syne, telling that the hour of ten had arrived, she hurried into her rubbers and ulster to face the tempest.

Wild streaks of lightning faced her at the threshold. A gust of wind seized her and hurried her along for an instant, then in a wild, freakish turn all but threw her upon the pavement. A deluge of rain, seeming to extinguish the very street light, beat down upon her.

“How foolish I am!” she muttered. “She would not come on a night like this.”

And yet she did come. Lucile had not been in her hiding place more than a half hour when she caught the familiar pit-pat of footsteps.

“This time she shall not escape me,” she whispered, as with bated breath and cushioned footstep she tiptoed toward the spot where the remaining Shakespeare rested.

Now she was three stacks away. As she paused to listen she knew the child was at the same distance in the opposite direction. She moved one stack nearer, then listened again.

She heard nothing. What had happened?—the child had paused. Had she heard? Lucile’s first impulse was to snap on a light. She hesitated and in hesitating lost.

There came a sudden glare of light. A child’s face was framed in it, a puzzled, frightened face. A slender hand went out and up. A book came down. The light went out. And all this happened with such incredible speed that Lucile stood glued to her tracks through it all.

She leaped toward the dummy elevator, only to hear the faint click which told that it was descending. She could not stop it. The child was gone.

She dashed to a window which was on the elevated station side. A few seconds of waiting and the lightning rewarded her. In the midst of a blinding flash, she caught sight of a tiny figure crossing a broad stretch of rain-soaked green.

The next instant, with rubbers in one hand and ulster in the other, she dashed down the stairs.

“I’ll get her yet,” she breathed. “She belongs down town. She’ll take the elevated. There is a car in seven minutes. I’ll make it, too. Then we shall see.”

CHAPTER III
THE GARGOYLE

Down a long stretch of sidewalk, across a sunken patch of green where the water was to her ankles, down a rain-drenched street, through pools of black water where sewers were choked, Lucile dashed. With no thought for health or safety she exposed herself to the blinding tempest and dashed before skidding autos, to arrive at last panting at the foot of the rusted iron stairs that led to the elevated railway platform.

Pausing only long enough to catch her breath and arrange her garments that the child might not be frightened away by her appearance, she hurried up the stairs. The train came thundering in. There was just time to thrust a dime through the wicker window and to bound for the door.

Catching a fleeting glimpse of the dripping figure of the child, she made a dash for that car and made it. A moment later, with her ulster thrown over on the seat beside her, she found herself facing the child.

Sitting there curled up in a corner, as she now was, hugging a bulky package wrapped in oilcloth, the child seemed older and tinier than ever.

“How could she do it?” was Lucile’s unspoken question as she watched the water oozing from her shoes to drip-drip to the floor below. With the question came a blind resolve to see the thing through to the end. This child was not the real culprit. Cost what it might, she would find who was behind her strange actions.

There is no place in all the world where a thunderstorm seems more terrible than in the deserted streets in the heart of a great city at night. Echoing and re-echoing between the towering walls of buildings, the thunder seems to be speaking to the universe. Flashing from a thousand windows to ten thousand others, the lightning seems to be searching the haunts and homes of men. The whole wild fury of it seems but the voice of nature defying man in his great stronghold, the city. It is as if in thundering tones she would tell him that great as he may imagine himself, he is not a law unto himself and can never be.

Into the heart of a great city on a night like this the elevated train carried Lucile and the child.

On the face of the child, thief as she undoubtedly was, and with the stolen goods in her possession, there flashed not one tremor, not a falling of an eyelash, which might be thought of as a sign of fear of laws of nature, man or God. Was she hardened or completely innocent of guilt? Who at that moment could tell?

It would be hard to imagine a more desolate spot than that in which the car discharged its two passengers. As Lucile’s eye saw the sea of dreary, water-soaked tenements and tumbledown cottages that, like cattle left out in the storm, hovered beside the elevated tracks, she shivered and was tempted to turn back—yet she went on.

A half block from the station she passed a policeman. Again she hesitated. The child was but a half block before her. She suspected nothing. It would be so easy to say to the policeman, “Stop that child. She is a thief. She has stolen property concealed beneath her cape.” The law would then