CHAPTER TEN
STORROW went home, but not to sleep. As he mounted the gloomy stairways that led to his studio he stopped suddenly, sniffing in the dark- ness. There was an unmistakable smell of gas about the building. That was one of the drawbacks, he men- tally remarked, in living in those ramshackle old ruins. There was always the promise of defective plumbing, the evidence of repairs deferred. And somewhere, without a doubt, a pipe- joint had sprung a leak.
Once inside his studio, he crossed to the corner of the room where a panelled clothes-horse, covered with painted burlap, shut off from general view the kitchenette which held his small gas-stove. He switched on the light and examined this stove carefully, to make sure the leak was not within his own territory. There, however, he found nothing wrong. The air within the studio, in fact, was quite untainted.
Frowning, he advanced towards the oblong of tapestry on his wall. He threw back the imitation Gobelin and sniffed along the doorcracks. This, however, did not satisfy him. Without giving actual thought to the move- ment he slipped back the metal bolt and tried the door.
His first surprise came with the fact that it opened. His second surprise lay in the discovery that the lights were on in Torrie Throssel's studio. And his third sur- prise took the form of Torrie Throssel herself, standing within three feet of him. She was wearing a man's bath-robe, which was much too big for her, doubled about her waist and held in by a girdle of plaited silk. Her
preoccupied face, he noticed, was almost colourless. The
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