“Somebody is in this room!”
It was a woman’s voice that broke in on the black silence, a quiet but sternly challenging voice, tremulous with agitation, yet strident with the triumph of conviction, and with resolute courage.
“Who is here?”
Frances Candler did not move. She stood there, breathing a little heavily, watching. For now that sudden challenge neither thrilled nor agitated her. Consciousness, in some way, refused to react. Her tired nerves had already been strained to their uttermost; nothing now could stir her dormant senses.
Then she felt the sudden patter of bare feet on the floor.
Still she waited, wondering what this movement could mean. And, as she had felt at other times, in moments of dire peril, a sense of detached and disembodied personality seized her—a feeling that the mind had slipped its sheath of the body and was standing on watch beyond and above her. She suddenly heard the sound of a key being withdrawn. It was from the door leading into the hallway. Then, almost before she realized what it meant, the bedroom door had been slammed shut, a second key had rattled and clicked decisively in its lock—and she was a prisoner!
A moment later she caught the sound of the signal-bell in the alcove.
“Central, quickly, give me the Sixty-Seventh Street police station!” It was the same clear and determined young voice that had spoken from the doorway.
There was a silence of only a few seconds. Then Frances heard the girl give her name and house number. This she had to repeat twice, apparently, to the sleepy sergeant.
“There is a burglar in this house. Send an officer here, please, at once!”