Excerpt from The Second Latchkey Even when Annesley Grayle turned out of the Strand toward the Savoy She was uncertain whether She would have courage to walk into the hotel. With each step the thing, the dreadful thing, that she had come to do, loomed blacker. It was mon strous, impossible, like opening the door of the lions' cage at the Zoo and stepping inside. There was time still to change her mind. She had only to turn now jump into an omnibus jump out again at the familiar corner, and everything would be as it had been. Life for the next five, ten, maybe twenty years, would be what the last five had been. At the thought of the Savoy and the adventure waiting there, the girl's skin had tingled and grown hot, as if a wind laden with grains of heated sand had blown over her. But at the thought of turning back, of going home - oh, misused word -a leaden coldness shut her Spirit into a tomb. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.