“Then kiss me!” she said, with a little exhausted sigh of ultimate surrender, as she sank into his arms and her lonely and hungry body felt the solace of his strength about and above it. And in that minute they lost all count of time and place, and for them, with the great glimmering granite city stretching away at their feet, there was neither past nor future.
CHAPTER XVIII
Frances Candler waited until complete quiet reigned over the house. Then she noiselessly opened her door and peered up and down the darkened hallway.
A sudden thought came to her, as she stood there in the silence, and, slipping back to her room, she took first a hot-water bottle out of her nurse’s bag, and then a hypodermic syringe from its neat little morocco case. Miss Annie Seabrooke, she decided, had been making melancholy use of her knowledge of drugs. That enlightened young lady was, obviously, addicted to the use of morphine, for beside the syringe-case Frances found a little bottle bearing its telltale chemical formula: C17 H19 NO3.
She removed the screw-top from the graduated “barrel,” and in its place adjusted the glistening little hollow needle. Then she carefully filled the graduated tube with its innocent-looking liquid, and, wrapping the syringe in her pocket-handkerchief, thrust it into the bosom of her bodice. Many things lay ahead of her, and before the night was out even this might be of use. She devoutly hoped not—yet the present moment, she warned herself, was no time for hesitations and compunctious half-measures.
The hot-water bottle she carried openly in her hand, as she once more softly opened the door and crept out into the half-lighted hallway.
They had given her a room on the third floor, a concession, she imagined, to the established dignity of her profession. Most of the servants slept on the fourth floor. It had, accordingly, been by way of the front stairs that the bibulous English butler, with more than one sidelong blink of admiration had brought her up to her quarters for the night.
She felt that she would like to find the back stairway, the stairway by which the household servants came and went.
She moved forward softly, listening a second at doorways as she passed. It crept through her mind at that moment, incongruously enough, how like her own future lay this silent and unknown house, with its dark entanglement of possibilities, its network of unknown dangers and surprises, its staid and unbetraying doors behind which so much or so little might anywhere dwell.
Then she suddenly stood transfixed, panting a little. For the sound of approaching footsteps fell on her startled ear.