I let my gaze pivot about the room, point by point. Then, if I did not gasp, there was at least a sudden and involuntary cessation of breathing, for standing beside a second door at the farther end of the room was a woman dressed in black. On her head was a black hat, round which a veil was tightly wound, the front of it apparently thrust up hurriedly from her face. But what startled me was the fact that both her attitude and her position seemed such an exact duplication of my own.
With one hand, I noticed, she clung to the frame of the door. With the other hand she held back a heavy portière, which hung across this frame. I could see the white half-oval of her intent face as she stood there. Something about her suggested not the spying intruder so much as the secret listener. Her attention seemed directed toward some object which her eyes were not seeing. It appeared as though she stood waiting to overhear a sound which meant much to her.
As I peered past her through the dim light I could catch a faint glimmer of green and white marble, with here and there the high-lights reflected from polished nickel. I knew then that the room into which she was peering was a bathroom, and this bathroom, I concluded, opened on a second sleeping-chamber which held the raison d'être of her motionless apprehension. I directed my glance once more at the woman. Something almost penitential in her attitude brought the sudden thought to my mind that she had committed a crime at the mere memory of which she was already morally stricken. Unexpected discovery, I began to suspect, had driven her to an extreme which she was already beginning to regret. There was, in fact, something so pregnant and portentous in that unchanging attitude of hers that I began to feel it would be a mean surrender on my part to evade the issue in which I had already risked so much. So I moved silently into the room, crossing it without a sound, until I dropped into a high-backed fauteuil upholstered in embossed and pale-green leather.
I sat there studying her, unaccountably at my ease, fortified by the knowledge that I was the observer of an illicit intrusion and that my own presence, if impertinent, might at least be easily explained. I saw her sigh deeply and audibly, and then gently close the door, dropping the curtain as she turned slowly away.
I watched her as she crossed to the dresser, looked over the toilet articles on it, and then turned away. She next skirted a heavy cheval-mirror, crossed to the writing-table with her quick yet quietly restless movements, and from this table caught up what seemed to be a metal paper-knife. She moved on to an ivory and mother-of-pearl desk, which, apparently, she already knew to be locked. For after one short glance toward the curtained door again, she inserted the edge of the knife in a crack of this desk and slowly pried on the lock-bar that held it shut.
I saw her second apprehensive glance toward the curtained door as the lock sprung with a snap. She sank into a chair before it, breathing quickly, obviously waiting a minute or two to make sure she had not been overheard. Then with quick and dextrous fingers she rummaged through the desk. Just what she swept from one of the drawers into her open hand-bag I could not distinguish. But I plainly saw the package of letters which she took up in her hand, turned over and over, then carefully and quietly secreted within the bosom of her dress. She looked deeper into the desk, examined an additional paper or two which appeared not to interest her, and slowly swung back the cover.
Then she slowly rose to her feet, standing beside the desk. She let her gaze, as she stood there, wander about the room. I could distinctly see the look on her face, the hungry and unhappy look of unsatisfied greed. I sat motionless, waiting for that expression to change. I knew that it must change, for it would be but a moment or two before she caught sight of me. But I had seen enough. I felt sure of my position—in fact, I found a wayward relish in it, an almost enjoyable anticipation of the shock which I knew the discovery of my presence there would bring to her. I even exulted a little in that impending dramatic crisis, rejoicing in the slowness with which the inevitable yet epochal moment was approaching.
Her eyes must have dwelt on my figure for several seconds before her mind became convinced of my actual presence there. She did not scream, as I thought she was about to do when I saw one terrified hand go up to her partly open lips. Beyond that single hand-movement there was no motion whatever from her. She simply stood mere, white-faced and speechless, staring at me out of wide and vacant eyes.
"Good evening—or, rather, good morning!" I said, with all the calmness at my command.
For one brief second she glanced back toward the curtained door, as though behind it lay a sleeper my words might awaken. Then she stared at me again.