een to it
that lack of prompt action, at least, would not be the cause of marring
their plans.

A little dazed, overwrought, confused at the ground being cut from under
her where she had been so confident of a sure footing, she made her way
out of the building, and to the street--and for a block walked almost
aimlessly along. And then suddenly she turned hurriedly into a cross
street, and headed over toward the East Side. The experience had
not been a pleasant one, and it had upset most thoroughly all her
calculations; but it was very far, after all, from being disastrous.
It meant simply that she must now find Nicky Viner himself and warn
the man, and there was ample time in which to do that. The code message
specifically stated midnight as the hour at which they proposed to favor
old Viner with their unhallowed attentions, and as it was but a little
after ten now, she had nearly a full two hours in which to accomplish
what should not take her more than a few minutes.

Rhoda Gray's lips tightened a little, as she hurried along. Old Nicky
Viner still lived in the same disreputable tenement in which he had
lived on the night of that murder two years ago, and she could not ward
off the thought that it had been--yes, and was--an ideal place for a
murder, from the murderer's standpoint! The neighborhood was one of the
toughest in New York, and the tenement itself was frankly nothing more
than a den of crooks. True, she had visited there more than once, had
visited Nicky Viner there; but she had gone there then as the White
Moll, to whom even the most abandoned would have touched his cap.
To-night it was very different--she went there as a woman. And
yet, after all--she amended her own thoughts, smiling a little
seriously--surely she could disclose herself as the White Moll there
again to-night if the actual necessity arose, for surely crooks,
pokegetters, shillabers and lags though they were, and though the place
teemed with the dregs of the underworld, no one of them, even for the
reward that might be offered, would inform against her to the police!
And yet--again the mental pendulum swung the other way--she was not so
confident of that as she would like to be. In a general way there could
be no question but that she could count on the loyalty of those who
lived there; but there were always those upon whom one could never
count, those who were dead to all sense of loyalty, and alive only to
selfish gain and interest--a h