Ilam had sunk back heavily into a chair. Carpentaria caught sight of his face, and an awkward silence followed.
“I came on a matter of business,” Carpentaria said to Ilam, “but I won’t trouble you now, it will do to-morrow. Good-night.”
“We shall hope to see more of you,” said Rosie when Carpentaria had demonstrated that he really meant to go.
“Yes indeed,” said Pauline very quietly, and the visitor bowed.
And then Carpentaria, that glorious vision, had vanished.
“Cousin’s nerves are simply all to pieces,” commented Rosie, as the girls were going upstairs; “even a casual visitor upsets him. Did you notice his face as soon as the bell rang?”
CHAPTER XVI—The Box
Pauline had put the book down on the bed, and was bending over the fire pulling the coals together with the poker. She performed this homely, natural, everyday action more to reassure herself, to convince herself that she was in an everyday world, than because the fire needed attention. For the strange mystery of the speechless creature on the bed, helpless as though bound with chains and gagged by the devices of tortures, had seized and terrified her. She held the poker in the air and listened. Not a sound save the ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece! From all the sleeping house, not a sound. She might have been alone with the living corpse in the house, and yet she knew that Rosie, and Josephus Ilam, and the nurse, and the halfdozen servants, were in various rooms of it, perhaps sleeping, perhaps trying to sleep.