She wondered if she could manage to move the thing. At first sight, it seemed impossible, and yet the base might by chance be fitted with rollers or casters. She rushed over to the figure and began to tug at it with all her strength.
She needed but a moment to discover that she could not possibly move it; but as she bent over it, her head close to its side, she heard something which made her start with sudden joy.
It was the low sobbing of a child—the same moaning sound which she had heard from time to time ever since she had first entered the room.
At times the sound had appeared to come from afar off; at others, it had seemed to be close at hand, as though originating at some point in the very air about her.
All of a sudden the truth came to her like a flash. The child was concealed within the hollow body of the statue. The thing seemed so simple, so apparent, that she wondered that it had not occurred to her before.
She gave up her attempt to barricade the door, and began feverishly to look for the opening in the plaster cast through which the child must have entered.
It took but a few moments to find it. The whole side of the horse's body had been sawed free, by two longitudinal cuts, one along the back, the other along the belly, and two similar cuts, at the shoulder, and the flank. Heavy strips of canvas, glued across the lower cut, on the under side of the horse's belly, served as hinges, and were not visible from above.
She inserted the blade of a modeling tool which she caught up from the table, in the upper longitudinal cut, and pried the plaster side of the horse free. It fell heavily toward her, disclosing a long narrow opening; the interior, in fact, of the statue, where lay, upon a sort of bed made of an old comfort, the missing son of Mr. Stapleton.
The boy, who had evidently until a moment before been asleep, gazed up at her in surprised alarm. For over two weeks, now, he had been kept from his parents, made to move about from place to place, frightened by strange men. He had come to expect the unusual, the terrifying, and it was a scared little face that looked appealingly up at the girl as she bent over him.
For the time being she forgot the dangers which surrounded them, in her joy at the discovery of the boy. It had come so suddenly, so unexpectedly. If she could only escape, now, with the child, nothing else would matter in the least. And between her and freedom there lay but the thickness of a single door, and yet it seemed that she could not pass it.