She said it aloud, and her voice sounded as though it were not her own. It was a dreadful voice, and, as she heard it, panic seized her.
Nobody knew—nobody! Her mother never either knew or cared where she was, but Dowie and Mademoiselle always knew. They would be terrified. Fräulein Hirsch had, perhaps, been told that her pupil had taken a cab and gone home and she would return to her lodgings thinking she was safe.
Then—only at this moment, and with a suddenness which produced a sense of shock—she recalled that it was Fräulein Hirsch who had presented her to Lady Etynge. Fräulein Hirsch herself! It was she who had said she had been in her employ and had taught Hélène—Hélène! It was she who had related anecdotes about the Convent at Tours and the nuns who were so wise and kind! Robin’s hand went up to her forehead with a panic-stricken gesture. Fräulein Hirsch had made an excuse for leaving her with Lady Etynge—to be brought up to the top of the house quite alone—and locked in. Fräulein Hirsch had known! And there came back to her the memory of the furtive eyes whose sly, adoring sidelooks at Count Von Hillern had always—though she had tried not to feel it—been, somehow, glances she had disliked—yes, disliked!
It was here—by the thread of Fräulein Hirsch—that Count Von Hillern was drawn into her mind. Once there, it was as if he stood near her—quite close—looking down under his heavy, drooping lids with stealthy, plunging eyes. It had always been when Fräulein Hirsch had walked with her that they had met him—almost as if by arrangement.
There were only two people in the world who might—because she herself had so hated them—dislike and choose in some way to punish her. One was Count Von Hillern. The other was Lord Coombe. Lord Coombe, she knew, was bad, vicious, did the things people only hinted at without speaking of them plainly. A sense of instinctive revolt in the strength of her antipathy to Von Hillern made her feel that he must be of the same order.
“If either of them came into this room now and locked the door behind him, I could not get out.”
She heard herself say it aloud in the strange girl’s dreadful voice, as she had heard herself speak of the party in the big house opposite. She put her soft, slim hand up to her soft, slim throat.
“I could not get out,” she repeated.
She ran to the door and began to beat on its panels. By this time, she knew it would be no use and yet she beat with her hands until they were bruised and then she snatched up a book and beat with that. She thought she must have been beating half an hour when she realized that someone was standing outside in the corridor, and the someone said, in a voice she recognized as belonging to the leering footman,
“May as well keep still, Miss. You can’t hammer it down and no one’s going to bother taking any notice,” and then his footsteps retired down the stairs. She involuntarily clenched her hurt hands and the shuddering began again though she stood in the middle of the room with a rigid body and her head thrown fiercely back.