restaurant,
a garish establishment, most popular of all resorts for the moment on
the East Side, where Fifth Avenue, in the fond belief that it was seeing
the real thing in "seamy" life, engaged its table a week in advance.
Jimmie Dale pushed a bill into the door attendant's hand, accompanied by
an injunction to keep an eye on the machine, and entered the cafe.

But for a sort of tinselled ostentation the place might well have been
the Marlianne's that he had just left--it was crowded and riot was
at its height; a stringed orchestra in Hungarian costume played what
purported to be Hungarian airs; shouts, laughter, clatter of dishes,
and thump of steins added to the din. He made his way between the
close-packed tables to the stairs, and descended to the lower floor.
Here, if anything, the confusion was greater than above; but here,
too, was an exit through to the rear street--and a moment later he was
sauntering past the front of an unkempt little pawnshop, closed for
the night, over whose door, in the murk of a distant street lamp, three
balls hung in sagging disarray, tawny with age, and across whose dirty,
unwashed windows, letters missing, ran the legend:

IS AC PELINA Pawn brok r

The pawnshop made the corner of a very dark and narrow lane--and, with a
quick glance around him to assure himself that he was unobserved, Jimmie
Dale stepped into the alleyway, and, lost instantly in the blacker
shadows, stole along by the wall of the pawnshop. Old Isaac's business
was not all done through the front door.

And then suddenly Jimmie Dale shrank still closer against the wall. Was
it intuition, premonition--or reality? There seemed an uncanny feeling
of PRESENCE around him, as though perhaps he were watched, as though
others beside himself were in the lane. Yes; ahead of him a shadow
moved--he could just barely distinguish it now that his eyes had grown
accustomed to the darkness. It, like himself, was close against the
wall, and now it slunk noiselessly down the length of the lane until he
lost sight of it. AND WHAT WAS THAT? He strained his ears to listen. It
seemed like a window being opened or closed, cautiously, stealthily, the
fraction of an inch at a time. And then he located the sound--it came
from the other side of the lane and very nearly opposite to where, on
the second floor, a dull, yellow glow shone out from old Isaac's private
den in the rear of the pawnshop's office.

Jimmie Dale's brows were gathere