It was a large square room, with a mouldy old-fashioned wall-paper, on which unnatural pink roses climbed up a succession of thin hop poles. The pictures were groups of trees, done with the pencil in the woolly early Victorian manner, and stiff bouquets, in water-color, of conventional early Victorian flowers. The bed, which was hung with green curtains, occupied an undue space; and Mabin felt that, in the weird circumstances of her tenancy of the room, she would have died rather than sleep in that funereal erection.
When Mrs. Dale had kissed her and bade her good-night, after receiving Mabin’s assurance that she did not feel in the least nervous, the young girl felt a strong inclination to follow her friend out of the room, and to implore her to find her some other sleeping-place.
By a valiant effort, however, she conquered this weakness, and made a careful survey of her surroundings. In the first place, the windows and their fastenings had to be examined. They were carefully secured, and were both so high above the ground that it would have been impossible for an intruder to reach them without a ladder.
There were three doors; and at first Mabin was inclined to regard this as a disquieting circumstance. But on finding that two of them were unused, locked, and without a key, and that there was a bolt on the door by which she had entered, she began to feel more at ease.
Exchanging her frock for a dressing-gown, and providing herself with a book, she placed herself in an arm-chair which stood near the fireplace, which, although shabby, was sufficiently comfortable, and, putting her candles on a small table beside her, settled herself to read. Her book was a novel of an excellent type, not too clever to be charming, not so commonplace as to be dull. Much to her own surprise, she got interested, and forgot, or almost forgot, the vague fears which kept her in the arm-chair instead of in bed.
She was in the very heart of the book, and her candles had burnt low in their sockets, when a sound, a very slight sound, behind her back, caused the blood almost to freeze in her veins.
It was a soft, stealthy tread.
Looking round, half paralyzed with terror, she saw that the door was ajar, and that creeping softly round toward the inside handle was the long, thin hand of a man.
CHAPTER IX.
A PICTURE.
In the ordinary course of things, it would have been natural for Mabin to conclude, on seeing a man’s hand inside her door in the middle of the night, that the intruder was a burglar. But her mind had been rendered more clear, her perceptions more acute, by the stimulating mystery which she had been for the past two days trying to solve.