Madame Cimmino pushed back her plate abruptly and swept from the room as the girl seated herself, and Wolvert glanced up with a nod, but his usually facile tongue was stilled and his eyes seemed to blaze as they rested upon her. Into his expression Betty read a shadow of that terror which had lurked there on two previous occasions and when she turned in growing wonder to her employer she found stamped upon her face also a look of dazed consternation akin to fear.
She drank her coffee and essayed to eat with her face averted, feeling that their eyes were fixed upon her in an intensity which seemed to burn into her consciousness. Had they discovered some clue to her presence in the music room on the previous night? Did they know that it was she who had tampered with the portrait and were they even now planning her punishment?
The food choked her and the ghastly pretense of a meal seemed unending, but at last Mrs. Atterbury rose.
"You need not attend to the mail this morning, my dear." She tried to speak casually, but the odd quaver persisted in her tones. "I shall be too busy to dictate replies, and it will have to wait until another time. There is a pile of mending in the sewing room, however, which I wish you would go over carefully."
Betty accepted her dismissal and ascended to the secluded room on the top floor, where she spent a lonely and anxious morning. The hours dragged and the silence wrought upon her nerves until she bit her lips to keep from shrieking out in the sheer agony of protracted suspense. Why were they waiting to visit their vengeance upon her if they were assured of her guilt? Anything would be better than this hideous uncertainty.
That the task which had been arranged for her was the most transparent of subterfuges for getting her out of the way became apparent when she examined the work laid out upon the table. The linen was of the coarsest variety, evidently from the servants' quarters, and it had long outlived its usefulness. It was yellowed, too, and creased, as though it had been laid away, forgotten in some musty recess, and she made but little progress, her thread tearing through the frail, worn fabric with each stitch.
What was going on below? Her window opened upon a rear view and from it she could see only the tops of the cedars, and the garage roof, but no sound of a motor approaching or leaving the house came to her in her solitude and she felt cut off from all the world.
The silence within doors remained unbroken, save once when she fancied that the echo of faint, hysterical sobbing reached her ears, but she could not be sure that her overstrained nerves were not playing her false.
Gradually the conviction grew within her that the ill-suppressed excitement and dismay were due to some cause other than the event of the night before, yet something which concerned her vitally. She could not forget the glances of horror and fear which had been directed at her. What could it be? What contingency had arisen of which she herself was in ignorance, yet which wrought the others to a condition bordering on panic? Was it that through her they dreaded interference and possible disaster from an outside source?
Betty anticipated that her lunch would be brought to her and her virtual isolation continued indefinitely, and she was surprised when Welch came to summon her to the meal. He still regarded her furtively and his huge, hairy hands clenched and unclenched as he stood before her. She gazed at them, repelled yet fascinated as if she could feel them already closing about her throat. Had they wielded the knife which had slain Breckinridge? She passed him with a shudder and descended.