Sitting now on a bed with a shaky-looking tester bulking overhead, Bennett scowled at a pitcher of hot water in a washbowl nearby. Damn their water in pitchers and their asthmatic fires and their open windows. Sybaritic American, eh? Well, why not? At least his bags had been deftly unpacked. He found his shaving-tackle, and over the wash-stand discovered a small mirror hung at a neck-breaking angle, out of which a hideous Coney-Island reflection leered at him from the wavy glass. This was worse than waking up with a hangover. Where was the old sense of humor? Hunger, loss of sleep, horrors: and across the hallway was a room where somebody had tried to throw Marcia Tait down a flight of stone stairs
Then he heard it. He heard the sound, the cry, whatever it was, that trembled somewhere along the gallery outside. The razor slipped out of his fingers. For a moment he felt sheer unreasoning terror.
A scuffling noise, and then silence.
He had to do something as an outlet for anger, or fear, or both. Groping after a dressing-gown, he twisted himself into it. The thing would squeeze up like a rolled umbrella when you tried to jam your hands through the armholes; you stepped on the trailing end of the waist-cord and pulled the whole thing out. He got it over his shoulders somehow, and opened the door to peer into the gallery.
Nothing at least, nothing of visual fear or danger. He was at the end of the gallery, where there was a big latticed window looking down on the roof of the porte-cochere. Smoky light showed him the faded red runner of carpet stretching away fifty feet to the head of the stairs, the line of doors in low oaken walls, the gilt frames and claw-footed chairs. He looked across at the door directly opposite. There was no reason to suppose the noise had come from King Charles's room, except that he associated it with all the stealth moving in this house. It was Bohun's room; but Bohun could not be there. He moved across and knocked. Then the big door creaked under his hand.
In a twilight of curtains that were nearly drawn across deep embrasures, he saw its vastness. He saw a glimmer of silver vases, a tall hearse of a bed-canopy, and the reflection of his own face in a mirror. The bed was made, but Bohun's clothes were flung about on chairs and bureau-drawers hung drunkenly open. Instinctively he was peering round for that hidden door to the staircase.. This room occupied the angles of the house that looked down on the drive and the lawns towards the rear. The staircase, then, would be in the wall at his left hand; probably, between those two windows. That was where —.
He heard the noise again. It was behind him; it was in the gallery somewhere; behind one of those doors that locked up the White Priory's secrets. He moved a little way up the gallery, and a door opened almost in his face. It opened as quietly as the girl who came out, although she was breathing hard and her hands fumbled at her throat.
She did not see him. From the room behind her he heard a curious mutter and stir, as of a sick person, before she closed the door. She bent her head forward, slid against the wall, and then straightened up.
As she took her hands away, just before they looked at each other in the gloom, he saw the bruises on her throat. And he saw Marcia Tait's face.