The mood passed, with the passing of her fright, and she shook her tired nerves together with an effort. Then still once more she groped her way out through the darkness. Now, however, there was neither trepidation nor hesitancy in her silent movements, as she flitted through the hallway and passed like a shadow down the dark stairs.
She paused only once—at the door which she knew was Lydia Van Schaick’s bedroom. In an oriel window, opposite this door, was a little alcove fitted up with bookshelves, a highly polished writing-table, and two low-seated rattan lounging-chairs. On one end of the writing-table stood a flat silver vase holding a spray of roses; on the other end stood a desk-telephone transmitter and an oblong folio of green morocco, with “Telephone Addresses” stamped in gold on its richly tooled cover. All this Frances noticed with one quick glance, as, nursing the knob in her cautious fingers, she turned it slowly.
The door was securely locked, from the inside.
One chance remained to her—by way of the little white-tiled bathroom, which she had caught a glimpse of on her first journey up through the house. This bathroom, she knew, would open into the girl’s boudoir itself.
This door was unlocked. A moment later she was inside, and the door was closed behind her. She groped carefully across the tiled flooring until her finger-tips came in contact with the second door, which creaked a little at her touch, for it stood a few inches ajar.
This door she opened, inch by inch, in terror of that tiny hinge-creak. It was a sleeping-room, she knew, the moment she had crept inside; and it held a sleeper, for the air seemed laden with its subtle yet quite immaterial fragrance of warmth—vivified, as it were, with some intangible exhalation of its sleeping life.
She listened with strained attention, hoping to overhear the quiet and regular breathing of the sleeper. But no sound reached her ears.
Through the muffled darkness she could dimly make out the open doorway leading into what must be the girl’s sitting-room. In that room, Frances felt, would stand the chiffonier.
She felt her way to the foot of the bed. There she stood, strained second after second, still listening. No sound came from the sleeper. But, awed, for reasons that lay beyond the reach of her restless thought, she could feel the presence of the other life there, as distinctly as though the room had been steeped in noon-day light; and as she waited and listened there came to her a sense of the mystery of sleep, a feeling that, after all, this briefest midnight slumber was only a lighter and younger sister to that endless sleep of death itself.
Step by step, then, she crawled and edged her way into the second vault of black silence, feeling with outstretched fingers for each piece of furniture. The mirror-laden chiffonier, some womanly intuition told her, would stand between the two heavily curtained windows.