Betty smiled.
"Your threats do not interest me, Madame Cimmino. I shall accept censure only from Mrs. Atterbury, and I beg that you will go to her. I really cannot listen any longer to these unfounded accusations."
She turned and left the other inarticulate with rage. Her own heart was filled with a dull ache of resentment, not against the hysterical virago and her absurd charge, but against the perverse fate which through no act or fault of hers, seemed rearing difficulty after difficulty in the way of her purpose. She did not underestimate the intelligence of Wolvert or the danger of arousing his suspicions, while she realized that the jealous animosity of Madame Cimmino might at any moment precipitate a crisis. She must walk warily, indeed.
Her message delivered to Welch, she ascended the back stairs to avoid a second encounter with the woman who had become her enemy, and was rounding the gallery shadowed in the gathering dusk, when a blotch of white lying against the baseboard caught her eye.
It was a folded paper, crumpled in the center and even before she opened it, a premonition warned her of its contents. The cipher letter! The significant words leaped out at her anew from the irrelevancies with which they were cloaked and on a swift impulse she thrust the letter into her breast.
Late that night when all was still Betty crept from her room and down the stairs like an unquiet wraith intent upon the secret motive which actuated her, yet on her guard for the slightest warning of discovery.
The darting ray from her electric torch played before her, dancing in a diminutive circle of light upon the wall and piercing the almost opaque darkness like a flash of forked lightning. The midnight silence was oppressive in its intensity and for the first time there seemed to be a brooding menace in the soundless void.
The girl's nerves were tingling and the torch wavered fitfully in her hand. A hallucination, vague but terrible, took possession of her that something unnameable lurked in the shadows watching, crouched to spring. In vain she summoned her resolute will to her aid, lashing herself with scorn for her weakness. A swift unreasoning fear clutched her by the throat and her trembling limbs all but refused her support.
Doggedly she forced herself to go on but the distance from stair foot to library door seemed interminable and when she had traversed it Betty paused, an unexplainable reluctance staying her hand upon the knob.
At length she set her teeth and with an impatient jerk opened the door. Her torch light circled about the familiar room, the desk with its orderly array of papers, the center table, the bookcases—