"Ha! Which way was she looking—up—down?"
"Straight ahead, sir,—west. She seemed to be looking at or trying to see something about on a level with her head."
"On a level with her head, eh? That would be somewhat above our own." And the Captain involuntarily faced about to the west. Raising his eyes to an approximate level with those of a person standing at the window, they encountered nothing but the night sky, against which were silhouetted in dense blackness the blended outlines of trees and a gable of the house across Tenth Street. All sense of perspective was lost. And surely nothing there that a candle might aid one in seeing: its tiny light would be as insignificant—if the contrast is not already plain—as a dewdrop in the crater of Vesuvius. Finally he brought back a questioning eye to the young man's sober countenance.
"It was queer," McCaleb at once continued. "But I haven't told you the queerest part. I looked around, trying to see what she could be after—only I walked about quite a bit; but I saw nothing more than usual. Everything was perfectly quiet; no one even passed in the street all the time I was waiting here, and look as I might, I saw no one to whom she could have been making signals—not an answering light anywhere."
The speaker stopped with a start. A sudden accession of light caused both to look up, and Converse perceived the slight, graceful figure of Joyce Westbrook standing by one of the windows. The blind was now raised, and all the lights in an electrolier behind the girl threw a flood of reflected radiance upon the beautiful countenance. The light cast an aureole about her wealth of hair—ebon tresses which, if unbound, would dissolve into the fluent blackness of night, like water into water. Either by a trick of the light, or in reality, her loveliness was so etherealized as to make this motionless apparition positively weird.
At last she turned slowly away and disappeared, without drawing down the shade. A disheartening sense of depression, such as he had experienced after leaving Miss Charlotte, came over Converse again, while the detective instinct was uncompromisingly alert to McCaleb's words. Whether the vision of Joyce evoked any such feelings in the younger man, it would be impossible to say; his hawk-like gaze remained riveted upon her while she stood at the window—as if she were merely an enigma hard to solve—and as soon as she was gone, he resumed speaking in unaltered tones.
"The incident was mighty puzzling, and I began a quiet, systematic quizzing of the servants, with an idea of clearing up this side-mystery. First, I got from Miss Westbrook's woman the fact that her mistress had for a week or two left a light at that window every night. Upon being pressed closer, Melissa told me the light was first placed there on the night of Saturday, the seventh; that it was always at that particular window, and that it was allowed to burn all night."
"Do you mean, Mac, that of those two windows so close together the light is never by any chance left at the other?"
"That's it, sir; it's always the southernmost window."
"And you say these windows can't be seen from the street?"