THE MYSTERY OF MURRAY DAVENPORT




CHAPTER I.


MR. LARCHER GOES OUT IN THE RAIN

The night set in with heavy and unceasing rain, and, though the month was
August, winter itself could not have made the streets less inviting than
they looked to Thomas Larcher. Having dined at the caterer's in the
basement, and got the damp of the afternoon removed from his clothes and
dried out of his skin, he stood at his window and gazed down at the
reflections of the lights on the watery asphalt. The few people he saw
were hastening laboriously under umbrellas which guided torrents down
their backs and left their legs and feet open to the pour. Clean and dry
in his dressing-gown and slippers, Mr. Larcher turned toward his easy
chair and oaken bookcase, and thanked his stars that no engagement called
him forth. On such a night there was indeed no place like home, limited
though home was to a second-story "bed sitting-room" in a house of
"furnished rooms to let" on a crosstown street traversing the part of New
York dominated by the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.

Mr. Larcher, who was a blue-eyed young man of medium size and medium