"No! I don't know what I meant!"
She turned a pale face in the dimness of the hall. "Whoever did this killed father too. You all think so. And, listen! There was a reason. I know there was a reason now. And it's ghastly-and awful-and all that, but, O my God! I hope it's true!… Don't. stare at me like that. I'm not mad. Really."
Her low voice was growing a trifle thick, and she spoke as one who begins to see shapes in a mist. The dark blue eyes were eerie now.
"Listen. That paper-it gives directions for something. What? If father was killed, murdered by somebody — no curse, but deliberately murdered — what then?"
"I don't know."
"But I think I do. If father was murdered, he wasn't murdered for following out directions in those verses. But maybe somebody else had fathomed the verses. Maybe there's something hidden — something those verses have a clue to-and the murderer killed father because father had surprised him at work…!"
Rampole stared at her tense face, and her hand groping before her as though she touched a secret, lightly. He said':
"You're — you're not talking about anything so wild as buried treasure?"
She nodded. "I don't care about that… What I mean is, if that is true, don't you see, there isn't any curse — there isn't any madness-I'm not tainted, nor any of us. That's what 1 care about." In an even lower voice: "You've only got to wonder whether there's any horrible seed in your blood, and brood about it, to go through the worst hell”
He touched her hand. There was a pent-up silence, a sense of fears pattering in a dark room, and windows that needed to be opened to daylight.