As to when the police would be summoned and of what their procedure would consist, she knew nothing. Her hope was to escape by the causeway that night. From this Anne had saved her. In her terror of recognition she had kept silent knowing her voice would betray her.
The next day she had been a prey to a rising tide of alarm. From behind a curtain she had watched the search of the island and realized a hunt through the top floor must follow. Every sign of her presence was obliterated and she studied her surroundings for a hiding-place. The windows, opened half-way to air the rooms, suggested the possibility of a cache outside. Climbing up the wall and extending to the roof was the great wisteria vine, its outspread branches twisted into ropes and covered with a mantle of dense foliage. The main trunk passed close to the window of the room that faced the stair-head, the place where she sat waiting for ascending footsteps. When Anne had made her visit, she had heard the first creak of the stairs and crawled out under the raised window. With a foothold on the gutter she had slipped behind the curtain of the vine, her hands gripped round its limbs. Even from the garden below she thought it would have been impossible to detect her. Of Anne’s whispered pleadings she had heard nothing; she had supposed the intruder one of the men. When they came up she had had plenty of time to hide for she had heard their footsteps when they came along the hall.
“Sleep!” she said, in answer to Anne’s question. “I never thought of sleep. I was in this room all the time, waiting and listening. I didn’t even dare to lie on the bed for fear I couldn’t get it smooth again. The candies and crackers kept me from being hungry. But when your whole being is on such a strain you don’t think of those things, you forget your body.”
After the visit of Rawson and Williams she knew the danger of detection increased with every hour. Also the necessity for food could not be denied much longer. The one chance left her was to get away that night, make what she felt would be a last attempt to gain the freedom that meant life to her. The darkness was in her favor and she resolved to slip from the house and cross the bed of the channel below the causeway. She was a good swimmer and though the central stream was deep and swift she was ready to match her strength against it. If she failed—but she hadn’t thought of failure—the goal to be reached was all she saw.
At the foot of the stairs she had hesitated, undecided whether to go by the living-room or the kitchen. Finally she chose the way she knew best, where she was familiar with the disposition of the furniture. As the flashlight burst she had made a noiseless rush for the stairs, was in the upper passage when the women’s doors flew open and Rawson came running along the hall below. The darkness and noise had covered her flight, but in her eyrie on the top floor she had crouched at the head of the stairs sick with uncertainty and dread. The concerted shrieks of the women had come eerily to her—cries of her own name. She guessed then a picture had been taken, they had seen it, and she waited not knowing what was coming. She had stayed there a long time, listening with every sense alert, heard silence gathering over the house and then gone back to her place by the window:
“I hadn’t given up, I had the spirit to fight still. But it was so awful not knowing anything, what they were doing, if they’d found out I was alive. And what was I to do—stay here, get out on the island? I couldn’t tell, I was all in the dark, and I felt my nerve weaken for the first time. And then I heard your voice, Anne, ‘I’m coming to help you,’ it said.” She drew back and looked with solemn meaning into the other’s face. “You meant it? You will help me?”
“Sybil, you know it.”
“There’s only one way you can.”
“Any way.”
“Let me go.”