o master the provisions of "An Act to Amend the Domestic
Relations Law, by providing for Marriage Licenses," for they must
perforce be silent on the one topic wherein he needed guidance--the
course to be pursued in the circumstances now facing him.

His thoughts were focussed on the name and address of the girl who had
been so cruelly, so wantonly, bereft of her lover, and it seemed to him
both fitting and charitable that someone other than a police sergeant
or detective should interpose between the grim tragedy of 27th Street
and the even more poignant horror which was fated to descend on some
house in 59th Street. Apparently, fate had decreed that he should be
the messenger charged with this sad errand, and, with a singular
disregard of consequences, he accepted the mandate.

He did not act blindly. When all was said and done, the certificate
had come into his possession by unavoidable chance. At the hapless
bride's residence he would surely be able to meet someone who could
accompany him to the police office, and give the details needed for a
successful chase. Indeed, he argued that he was saving valuable time
by his prompt action, and, reviewing the whole of the facts while being
carried swiftly up Broadway in a taxi, he found, at first, no flaw in
his judgment.

Though busy in mind with the extraordinary events of the past quarter
of an hour, his alert eyes missed few features of the abounding life of
the Great White Way. As it happened, a stranger in New York could not
have entered the city's main thoroughfare at any point better
calculated to bewilder and astound than the very corner where Curtis
had picked up the cab. On both sides, from the level of the street to
a height often measurable in hundreds of feet, nearly every building
blazed with electric signs. Many of the devices seemed to be alive.
Horses galloped, either in Roman stadium or modern polo-ground; a
girl's skirts were fluttered by a rain-storm; a giant's hand, with
unerring skill, bowled a ball at ten-pins in a bowling alley; the names
of theaters, of hotels, of drugs, of patent foods, of every known
variety of caterer for human needs and amusements, flickered, and
winked, and stared, at the passer-by from ground floor to attic--while
each and all--horses, skirts, rain-drops, hand, ball, pins, and
names--glowed in every known shade of color from every known form of
electric lamp.

The glare of this advertisers' paradise was so overpoweri