How she had managed to reach her room after the shock of her tragic discovery, she could not have told. No memory remained with her of that swift silent flight from the room of death. She only knew that she found herself back in bed once more, trembling in every limb and with an icy, pulseless void in her breast where her heart had been. Reason itself seemed to have fled, and her thoughts become a whirling phantasmagoria of horror in which but one thing stood out as if stamped indelibly upon her mind: the face of the slain man.
It floated before her in the darkness as distinctly as the pitiless glare of her torch had revealed it, strangely calm and detached amid the debris of the devastated room below, and the girl cowered as if once more in its dread presence.
For hours which seemed like years she lay in an agony of expectancy, waiting for a cry of alarm when the inevitable discovery should be made. But no sound broke the tomb-like stillness save once, when a vague muffled thud came to her ears. Even that she could not be sure of, for her senses were tottering on the verge of hysteria, and the night passed in the hideous unreality of a dream.
With the dawn came utter exhaustion, but she desperately combatted its lethargy, in fear lest sleep bring a nightmare which would wring from her unconscious lips a shriek of betrayal.
The hazy patch of light at her window broadened into day and at last faint but unmistakable sounds came to her from below. The servants were stirring, and surely now, at any moment, the alarm would be raised.
Wonder succeeded expectancy as the minutes passed and the normal tranquility of the house remained unbroken. At length, unable to endure the torture of inaction, she had arisen. Whatever the immediate future held in store, she, at least, must appear ignorant of all that had occurred during the silent watches of the night.
The breakfast gong sounded as she replaced her rouge unused in the drawer, and with leaden feet she descended the stairs. The door of the dining-room was open and from within it issued the cheerful clatter of silver and purr of the coffee urn.
As if hypnotized, Betty made her way down the hall but paused involuntarily on the threshold. The room was in perfect order, the furniture arranged as usual; even the great cut-glass bowl, which she had seen only a few hours before shattered into a score of fragments, stood whole and unmarred in its accustomed place upon the sideboard.
The girl's eyes turned incredulously to the hearth where the ghastly figure had lain. It was spic and span, and the pale gray of the silken rug showed no slightest trace of the sinister pool which had reddened it a few short hours before. The bright sunlight, streaming in between the curtains at the window, added the last touch of solid reality to the scene, and Betty felt that her sanity was rocking in the balance. Had she indeed been the victim of some fearful hallucination? Was the tragedy upon which she had stumbled but the figment of a dream?
All at once she became conscious of eyes upon her and turned sharply. Mrs. Atterbury stood just behind her, smiling her calm, inscrutable smile.