All the brazen assurance with which she had met us was gone.  She looked from one to the other and read that it was the end.  With a shriek, she suddenly darted past us, out of the door.  Down the hall was Ike the Dropper with the policeman and Carton.  Beside her was a stairway leading to the upper floors.  She chose the stairs.

Following Kennedy we hurried through the hotel, from one dirty room to another, with their loose and creaking floors, rotten and filthy, sagging as we walked, covered with matting that was rotting away.  Damp and unventilated, the air was heavy and filled with foul odours of tobacco, perfumery, and cheap disinfectants.  There seemed to have been no attempt to keep the place clean.

The rooms were small and separated by thin partitions through which conversations in even low tones could be heard.  The furniture was cheap and worn with constant use.

Downstairs we could hear the uproar as the news spread that the District Attorney was raiding the place.  As fast as they could the sordid crowd in the dance hall and cabaret was disappearing.  Now and then we could hear a door bang, a hasty conference, and then silence as some of the inmates realized that upstairs all escape was cut off.

On the top floor we came to a door, locked and bolted.  With all the force that he could gather in the narrow hall, Kennedy catapulted himself against it.  It yielded in its rottenness with a crash.

A woman, in all her finery, lay across the foot of a bed, a formless heap.  Kennedy turned her over.  It was Marie, motionless, but still breathing faintly.  In an armchair, with his hands hanging limply down almost to the floor, his head sagging forward on his chest, sprawled Harris.

Kennedy picked up a little silver receptacle on the floor where it lay near his right hand.  It was nearly empty, but as he looked from it quickly to the two insensible figures before us he muttered:  “Morphine.  They have robbed the law of its punishment.”

He bent over the suicides, but it was too late to do anything for them.  They had paid the price.

“My heavens!” he exclaimed suddenly, as a thought flashed over his mind.  “I hope they have not carried the secret of Betty Blackwell with them to the grave.  Where is Miss Kendall?”

Down the hall, cut off from the rest of the hotel into a sort of private suite, Clare had entered one of the rooms and was bending over a pale, wan shadow of a girl, tossing restlessly on a bed.  The room was scantily furnished with a dilapidated bureau in one corner and a rickety washstand equipped with a dirty washbowl and pitcher.  A few cheap chromos on the walls were the only decorations, and a small badly soiled rug covered a floor innocent for many years of soap.

I looked sharply at the girl lying before us.  Somehow it did not occur to me who she was.  She was so worn that anyone might safely have transported her through the streets and never have been questioned, in spite of the fact that every paper in the country which prints pictures had published her photograph, not once but many times.