During the simple but perfectly served meal, Betty unobtrusively studied the two guests seated at either hand. Madame Cimmino was evidently of Latin birth, although her quick, impulsive speech was interlarded with ejaculations in many tongues. Huge opal hoops dragged at the lobes of her ears and her brown, clawlike hands were loaded with rings which glistened barbarically in her ceaseless gesturing. She ignored the newcomer as far as courtesy permitted, snubbed Wolvert with a proprietary air, which failed to carry weight before his bland equanimity, but showed an anxious almost fawning deference to her hostess.
Wolvert made a half-playful attempt to draw out the little companion, but finding no encouragement in her shy, monosyllabic replies, he devoted himself to his dinner, and Betty found opportunity to observe him at her leisure. He was a man of approximately forty, lean and wiry with olive skin and curiously light eyes in grotesque contrast with his crisply curling, black hair and small, military mustache. The man's whole personality seemed oddly at variance. His hands were slender and shapely, with the tapering, sensitive fingers of an artist, yet the high Slavic cheekbones, spreading nostrils and heavy jaw belied a finer sensibility, and his face in repose was saturnine.
Regarding him, Betty could scarcely bring herself to believe that he was the same man who had burst upon the scene at the moment of her arrival with his impassioned outcry. The inexplicable words still rang in her ears. "'Ranza," was evidently Madame Speranza Cimmino, but why had she tried so frantically to ascertain Mrs. Atterbury's whereabouts during the long afternoon? Who was the man she had seen, and what was the meaning of the phrase that he had broken?
Dinner concluded, they returned to the drawing-room, and after a brief desultory conversation Betty was dismissed, to her infinite relief. Wolvert sprang forward gallantly to open the door for her departure and stood staring after her until she disappeared around the turning at the stair's head, the same puzzled, questioning look in his eyes with which he had regarded her at their meeting.
Her light extinguished, Betty lay motionless and seemingly relaxed, but her sleepless eyes were fixed as though they would pierce the darkness, and her ears strained for the slightest sound. The storm swirled unabated outside the windows, and the tall clock on the stairs droned out the hours at all but interminable intervals.
Midnight came, and with it the hum of a high-powered motor on the drive. A subdued murmur of voices floated up to her from the hall, the front door closed with a thud and the motor snorted its way through the piling snowdrifts to the gate. A few minutes later there was a faint silken rustle of skirts past her door, then the cat-like tread of Welch as he went his final rounds and darkness and utter silence reigned supreme.
One o'clock struck, then two, and as the echo of the second stroke died away, Betty threw back the covers, and slipping from bed stole to her dressing bag. She fumbled for a moment and then a tiny, thread-like ray of light leaped from her hand. With the electric torch carefully shielded, she enveloped herself in a dark kimona, thrust her feet into soft felt slippers, and unbolting her door, crept silently out into the hall. The gleaming strand of light wavered, then steadied and moved slowly along to the turning into the gallery. Its pale afterglow lingered like a nimbus for a minute and then vanished, and darkness descended once more about the sleeping house.
CHAPTER II.
The Silent Intruder.
The storm ceased with the coming of day, and when Betty awoke a glistening expanse of diamond-encrusted snow met her gaze between the parted curtains of her window. Softened by sleep, her face was flushed and girlishly winsome as she lay with the cruel scar pressed deep into her pillow, her bewildered eyes roving the unfamiliar room. Then, with returning consciousness, the shadow descended once more and her expression perceptibly hardened.