To turn and run was out of the question, for she had no knowledge of where or into what she might flee. To hesitate longer would be equally fatal. Instant action only could save her. As quick as thought she opened the door on her left, and stepped inside.
“Is it you, Adolph?” a whispered voice asked quietly, out of the gloom. It was a woman’s voice—she must have been a young woman, Frances commiseratively felt—a voice that was neither startled nor unhappy.
She stood, then, in one of the servants’ rooms. She pictured to herself the different faces she had seen below stairs, though in none of them could she remember any sign or hint of what she had now stumbled upon. But the pregnancy of that muffled question gave her a flashing consciousness of the wheels within even those inner wheels in the dark and complicated mills of life.
“Hsssssh!” said the intruder softly, as she quickly swung to the door, padding it with her hand.
She stood there, waiting until the steps passed by. They were brisk, businesslike steps, those of a woman, mingled with the tinkling of a chain of keys. She surmised that it was the housekeeper, on her last rounds for the night.
She realized the peril of another minute in the room. The wiring of the house, she had already noticed, with the quickness of an expert, was both thorough and modern. Any moment the turning of a bedside button might flood the room with brilliant light and leave her there, betrayed beyond redemption.
“Sssssssh!” she said again sharply, as though in warning, and a moment later dodged out through the door, going as noiselessly as she had come.
But the ground was now dangerous, she felt; and she was glad to escape to the comparative freedom of a wider hallway, running at right angles to the one she had just left. This surely led to the back stairs, she argued, as she groped her way steadily forward. She was even debating whether it would not be better to risk the fully-lighted front stairs, rather than lose time as she was doing, when her groping hands came in contact with the cool wood of the polished balustrade.
Her foot was on the carpeted second step, when she drew back, with a terrified catch of the breath.
The familiar click of the light-button had thrown the entire hall and stairway into dazzling light. A man stood at the foot of the stairs, in his slippered feet, with his hand still on the button. He had not yet seen her; but it was too late to escape.