Light and darkness, it was all the same to him. There was nobody in the house who could find his way about as well as he.
Then he waited for the best part of half an hour. He could hear queer sounds coming from one of the bedrooms, a half cry in light feminine tones, a smothered protest and then the suggestion of a struggle. Yet Ralph never moved toward it; under cover of the darkness he smiled.
Then he heard a door creak and open; he heard footsteps coming along in his direction. The footsteps were stealthy, yet halting; there was the suggestion of the swish of silken drapery. On and on that mysterious figure came until it walked plump into Ralph's arms.
There was a faint cry—a cry strangled in its birth.
"Mrs. May," Ralph said quietly, "I am afraid I startled you."
The woman was gasping for breath, iron-nerved as she was. She stammered out some halting, stumbling explanation. She was suffering from nervous headache, she was subject to that kind of thing, and there was a remedy she always carried in her jacket pocket. And the jacket was in the hall.
"Go back to your room," said Ralph. "I will fetch it for you."
"There is no occasion," the woman replied. "The shock of meeting you has cured me. But what are you doing?"
"Sleeping on the stairs," Ralph said in his dullest, most mechanical way.
"Sleep—sleeping on the stairs! Why?"