It is not impossible that Joe Harris, who had just been congratulating herself upon a promenade with a man not only good-looking but comparatively _young_, may have had her personal objections to the even temporary substitution of sixty-five or seventy; but if so, her red lip only pouted a little, and she said nothing more on the subject as the three took their way up Broadway and down Prince Street to the place where all the secrets of the past, present and future were to be revealed. CHAPTER XIV. NECROMANCY IN A THUNDER-STORM--A VERY IMPROPER "JOINING OF HANDS"--BELL CRAWFORD'S EYES, AND OTHER EYES--TWO PICTURES IN THE DUSSELDORF--A THUNDER-CLAP AND A SHRIEK--THE RED WOMAN WITHOUT A MASK. It was perhaps four o'clock in the afternoon when the trio of fortune-seekers reached the door that had been designated by the advertisement as No. -- Prince Street; and the fiery heat that had been pouring down during all the earlier part of the day was somewhat moderated by heavy clouds rising in the West and skimming half the upper sky, indicating a thunder-storm rapidly approaching. Perhaps Tom Leslie thought, as he approached the door sacred to the sublime mysteries of humbug, of the appropriateness of thunder in the heavens and lightning playing down on the beaten earth--provided he _should_ find the mysterious woman of the Rue la Reynie Ogniard, who had succeeded in giving to his frank and bold spirit the only shock it had ever received from the powers of the supernatural world. Perhaps he felt that for whatever was to come--melancholy jest or terrible earnest--the bursting roar of the warring elements would be a fitting accompaniment, to lend it a little dignity in the one event and to distract the overstrained attention in the other. Perhaps he was even a little theatrical in his fancies, and remembered the crashes of sheet-iron thunder and the blinding blaze of the gunpowder lightning, that always accompanied the shot-cylinder rain when Macbeth was seeking the weird sisters for the second time--when the fearful incantations of "Der Freischutz" were about to be commenced--or when the ever-ready demon was invoked by Faust, the first printer-devil. If he had any of these fancies he was in a fair way of being accommodated; for casting a glance up at the heavens as they approached the house, he saw that the obscurity was becoming still denser; and more than once, above the rumble of the carts and omnibuses that made Broadway one wide earthquake of subterranean noises, he caught a far-off booming that he knew to be the thunder of the advancing storm, already playing its fearful overture among the mountains of Pennsylvania.