What I found was more of a shock than what I was ready to meet.
CHAPTER XI
THE THIRD NIGHT
THIS was a child’s room; there were playthings on the floor.
The rain fell heavily on the low roof, blanketing the skylight and making the loft so dark that for a few seconds I could not see.
A sound came from a far corner. High-strung with terror, I thought it was some witless creature who had been concealed up here for many years, waiting for death to unburden it from a life that could never grow old.
It moved—and I saw it was the cat.
Again I could have killed it, but instead I sank down on the floor and began to laugh and cry.
“Come here, Cat! I won’t hurt you. We’re all mad together.”
But the cat mistrusted me. She slunk away, and for a while watched me very carefully, until, deciding that I had lost interest in her, she sat up and licked her tail. I wondered if this was her regular abode and if it was she whom I had heard walking above me at night, and, if so, how she managed an entrance when the doors were closed. Perhaps she was feline by day and by night was psychic. But she was not a confidential cat. Something fell coldly on my hand. I looked up. The skylight was leaking.
I could distinguish the furniture in the loft now. I saw a wash-bowl on a little stand, and put it under the loose-paned glass in the roof beneath which a pool was spreading. There was a low bureau in the room and a short turned bed, painted green, with a quilt thrown over one end, two little hand-made chairs, and one of those solid wooden rocking-horses, awesomely brave in the dusk. An open sea-chest held picture-books and paints and bent lead soldiers, and strewn upon the floor were quahaug-shells and a string of buoys. The room appeared as if its owner had just stepped out, and once more I took a cautious look around, behind me and in all the corners. Running my hand over the quilt I found that the dust of years was thick upon it. This attic had not been lived in recently. Its disturbed face was only the kind of confusion that is left after some one has died whose belongings are too precious to touch.