There are men different from those you have seen hitherto. Wait.
This I pinned to the pincushion on the dressing-table, beginning at once to creep toward the door, so as to seize the first opportunity of slipping down the back stairs.
But again I was frustrated.
“I’m all right now,” I heard Elsie say, reassuringly. “Don’t come up. Go back and go to bed.”
Miss Barry spoke as she returned along the hall toward her room: “The cook sleeps in the next room to you, so that if you’re afraid in the night you’ve only to hammer on the wall. But you needn’t be. This house is as safe as a prison.”
I had barely time to get into the bay window again and pull the curtains to.
Some five minutes followed, during which I heard the opening and shutting of drawers and closets and the swish and frou-frou of skirts. I began to curse my idiocy in fastening that silly bit of writing to the pincushion. My only hope lay in the possibility that she would go to bed and to sleep without seeing it.
With hearing grown extraordinarily acute I could trace every movement she made about the room. Presently I knew she had come back to the dressing-table again. Pulling up a chair, she sat down before it, to finish, I suppose, the arranging of her hair.
For a few seconds there was a silence, during which I could hear the thumping of my heart. Then came the faint rattling of paper. I knew when she read the thing by the slight catch in her breath. I expected more than that. I thought she would call out to her friend or otherwise give an alarm. If she went to a telephone to summon the police I decided to make a dash for it. Indeed, I meant to make a dash for it as it was, as soon as I knew her next move.