She felt herself slipping into unconsciousness, and through the sudden roaring in her ears she heard as though from a great distance Peter's voice calling: "Margaret, what is it? Where are you?"
A low, inhuman chuckle sounded immediately above her head, and there was something so gloating and fiendish in that soft sound that terror such as she had never known seized her. Then the waves met over her head and she fainted.
Chapter Fifteen
As he came into the hall from the servants' wing Peter heard Margaret's scream. It sounded muffled, but he heard her shriek his name, and crossed the hall in three bounds.
"Margaret, what is it?" he cried. "Where are you? Margaret! Margaret!"
The room was empty, and no answering call came to him. He stared round, then sprang instinctively to the window, only to find that the falling bolt was as he had left it, just holding the double windows together. She could not have gone that way, and hardly knowing what he did he tore the curtains apart and dragged the big leather screen aside. But she was not in the room. Yet a moment before he had heard her voice coming from this direction: she could not have gone far!
"Think! think!" drummed his brain. "Don't lose your head! Think!"
He came back into the middle of the room, and as he once more glared round for some clue to her whereabouts his eye caught sight of a crumpled handkerchief lying near the wall beside the fireplace. Quickly he crossed to where it lay, and picked it up. It was one of the flimsy scraps of crepe-de-chine she always used; he had returned it to her twice already this evening, for she invariably dropped it about.
His thoughts raced. She had been sitting on the other side of the fireplace all the evening; if she had dropped her handkerchief here she must for some reason or other have moved to this spot after he had left the room. What could have taken her there? His eyes ran swiftly over that side of the room. Not a book, for the shelves were on the opposite wall; nor the coal-scuttle, for he had taken that away. She must have stepped close up to the wall, too, for the handkerchief had been touching the wainscoting. Light began to break on Peter. She hadn't gone out by the window; she hadn't gone by the door, since when she screamed he had just come back into the hall, and must have seen her had she left the room by that exit. There remained only one solution: somewhere in the room was a secret entrance that they had none of them discovered.
He at once inspected the panelling, and went to the place where the handkerchief had lain, and sounded the panels all along that side of the fireplace. It was hard at first to detect a difference, but by dint of repeated banging on two panels he was almost sure that one had a different, and more hollow note. It was probably padded on the inside to disguise it, he guessed, and he began to feel all round the beading for any catch there might be. Some echo of Margaret's frantic cry still seemed to sound in his ears, and his hands moved with feverish haste over the woodwork. She must have accidentally discovered the moving panel, and then - what had happened? A rather sickening fear stole into him; his fingers tore fruitlessly at the beading; he even set his shoulder to the panel in a vain attempt to break it down. His reason checked him once more. It was no use getting desperate: he must think, and think quickly. How had she discovered the panel? Not by design, that much was certain. By accident it must have been, and what could she have been doing that led her to put her hand on the spring that worked it?