“There; is that right?”
The tragic eyes blinked, and a slight sigh emanated weakly from between those thin pale lips. But, slight as it was, it seemed to have come from the innermost depths of the stricken woman’s being. It might have been a sigh to indicate that her last wish was realized.
“I shall lie down now,” said Pauline, and turning out all the electric lights except the tiny table lamp on the table, she stretched herself on the couch which stood at the foot of the great bed, and she drew a rug over her and shut her eyes and told herself that she must sleep. But she could not sleep. Her brain was as busy as the inside of a clock and electric lights seemed to be burning and fizzing in it, extinguishing themselves and relighting themselves. What strange house had she and Rosie wandered into? What was the hidden secret of this paralysis, and of Josephus Ilam’s worn and worried mien, and of the sudden arrival and equally sudden departure of Carpentaria? And, above all, what was the meaning of the old woman’s desire for the box. What was in the box?
Do not imagine that Pauline regretted having come. She did not. Except under the passing influences of night and of the presence of illness, she was not a bit superstitious; nor was Rosie. They were not afraid of mysteries. They were intensely practical young women, incapable of being frightened or repulsed by what they did not understand. And that Pauline was a girl entirely without the timidity of the doe, she abundantly proved in the next few minutes. As she lay on the couch she could see, without moving her head, the French window. She fancied that the heavy crimson curtain was somewhat pulled aside in one place, at a height of about four feet from the ground, and she fancied that she could see the end of a finger on the end of the curtain. “No,” she said to herself, “this is ridiculous. There cannot possibly be a finger there. I must not be silly,” and she resolutely shut her eyes. The next time she opened them, the fire had blazed up a little and, more than ever, the something on the edge of the curtain resembled a finger.
Her little heart beating, but courageously, she noiselessly rose up from the couch and approached the window.
It was the end of a finger on the edge of the curtain—a finger with a rounded and very white finger-nail I Moreover, the curtain trembled slightly, as it would do if held by some one who was endeavouring not to move. Pauline remembered that the French window behind the curtain had purposely been left slightly open, and that it gave on to a balcony, as most of the windows of the bungalow did.
She advanced resolutely, and drew aside the curtain.