Then she told me that she too had gone through a frightful experience. When Roberta had left her, about an hour before, to sleep in the adjoining apartment, as they had arranged with Margaret G——, Penelope had tried to compose herself on her pillow, but she had scarcely fallen into a doze when she was awakened by the same sense of horrible fear that had overcome me. She was about to die—by violence. An assassin was coming—he was near her. She could hardly breathe. It was almost beyond her power to rise from the bed and search the apartment, but she did this. There was nothing, and yet the terror persisted. She huddled herself under the bed-covers and waited, saying her prayers. And when I entered the apartment and came down the passage—so slowly, so stealthily!—she knew it was the murderer coming to kill her. And when I paused at her bedside—how long it was before I drew the curtain!—she almost died again, waiting for the blow.
Of course I did not leave Penelope after this, but comforted her and prayed with her and rejoiced that her madness was past. Then we tried to sleep, locked in each other's arms, but, shortly after six, there came a timid knock at the door and, all of a tremble, Jeanne entered, Penelope's French maid who had come with her mistress to Roberta's party and had occupied a small room overhead, and she told us with hysterical sobs that she had not closed her eyes all night for ghastly visions of Penelope murdered in her bed.
Now it is easy to scoff at premonitions and haunting fears, but there can be no doubt that on this night an evil spirit was present in Roberta's apartment, a hideous, destructive entity that came and—wavered in its deadly purpose against Penelope, then—manifested to Roberta Vallis in the adjoining apartment, for when I went in there a little later I found Roberta—she who had mocked God and defied the powers of evil—I found her in her bed, her face convulsed with a look of indescribable terror—dead!
The hotel doctor reported it as a case of heart failure, but Doctor William Owen, who has an honest mind, acknowledged that all this was beyond his understanding. This tragedy made him realize at last that there may be sinister agencies in us and about us that cannot be dealt with by mere medical skill. And, at my pleading, he directed that Mrs. Wells be placed immediately in the care of Dr. Edgar Leroy.
Thank God, my precious Penelope will receive psychic treatment before it is too late. There is no other hope for her but this.