uman trait that, all too unfortunately,
was not confined to those alone who lived in that shadowland outside
the law. Her face, beneath the thick veil, relaxed a little. Well, she
certainly did not intend to make a test case of it and disclose herself
there as the White Moll, if she could help it! She would enter the
tenement unnoticed if she could, and make her way to Nicky Viner's two
miserable rooms on the second floor as secretively as she could. And,
knowing the place as she did, she was quite satisfied that, if she
were careful enough and cautious enough, she could both enter and leave
without being seen by any one except, of course, Nicky Viner.

She walked on quickly. Five minutes, ten minutes passed; and now, in a
narrow street, lighted mostly by the dull, yellow glow that seeped
up from the sidewalk through basement entrances, queer and forbidding
portals to sinister interiors, or filtered through the dirty windows
of uninviting little shops that ran the gamut from Chinese laundries
to oyster dens, she halted, drawn back in the shadows of a doorway, and
studied a tenement building that was just ahead of her. That was where
old Nicky Viner lived. A smile of grim whimsicality touched her lips.
Not a light showed in the place from top to bottom. From its exterior it
might have been uninhabited, even long deserted. But to one who knew, it
was quite the normal condition, quite what one would expect. Those who
lived there confined their activities mostly to the night; and their
exodus to their labors began when the labors of the world at large
ended--with the fall of darkness.

For a little while she watched the place, and kept glancing up and down
the street; and then, seizing her opportunity when for half a block or
more the street was free of pedestrians, she stole forward and reached
the tenement door. It was half open, and she slipped quickly inside into
the hall.

She stood here for a moment motionless; listening, striving to
accommodate her eyes to the darkness, and instinctively her hand went to
her pocket for the reassuring touch of her revolver. It was black back
there in the hallway of Gypsy Nan's lodging; she had not thought that
any greater degree of blackness could exist; but it was blacker here.
Only the sense of touch promised to be of any avail. If one could have
moved as noiselessly as a shadow moves, one could have passed another
within arm's-length unseen. And so she listened, listened intently