"What a fool I am!" thought the girl, tearing the thorny branch away from her arm. "What would he think of me? There!"
The door was open. She glided in, and shut it in haste, drawing a bolt inside.
"Bah! how musty the air is! With the shutters closed, the room seems like a grave. So much the better! No one can look through."
The little sitting-room was neatly arranged. Nothing but the chairs was out of place. Judith could see that, through all the gloom.
"Not here," she thought. "Nothing that he wants can be here. Her room first: that is the place to search."
CHAPTER LV.
SEARCHING A HOUSE.
UP the crooked staircase the girl turned and shut herself into a little chamber, opposite that in which Jessup had suffered his days of pain—a dainty chamber, in which the windows and bed were draped like a summer cloud, and on a toilet, white as virgin snow, a small mirror was clouded in like ice. Even the coarse nature of Judith Hart was struck by the pure stillness of the place she had come to desecrate, and she stood just within the threshold, as if terrified by her own audacity. "If he were here, I wonder if he would dare touch a thing?" she thought, going back to her purpose. "I wish he had done it himself; I don't like it."
She did not like it; being a woman, how could she? But the power of that bad man was strong upon her, and directly the humane thrill left her bosom. She was his slave again.