"And what were you doing in the library at this hour?" The woman's scrutiny fairly burned into Betty's brain, but her wide ingenuous eyes did not flinch nor her voice falter.
"I was restless and wakeful and I remembered a book I had left there, so I lighted my candle and went down. Everything was dark, but when I opened the library door I saw a man with an electric torch in his hand. He sprang forward and seized me and I thought it must be a burglar, until he spoke and I recognized Mr. Wolvert's voice. The safe was open and papers all scattered about, and somehow his manner frightened me. I—I thought I had better come straight to you."
"An electric torch?" Mrs. Atterbury repeated and paused, her lips pursed thoughtfully. Betty waited in an agony of suspense. Would the slender thread of her fabrication bear the weight of this woman's keen analysis or would it snap beneath her swift inexorable judgment? Freedom, perhaps life itself, hung upon the issue.
"You did the proper thing, my dear, and I am very glad that I can rely on you to let me know at once if anything seems wrong in the household." Mrs. Atterbury's smile announced the verdict. "But in this instance, everything is quite all right. Mr. Wolvert was going over some private accounts for me at my request, and doubtless you startled him by your sudden appearance as much as his presence surprised you."
"I am sorry I disturbed you—" Betty began in well-simulated contrition, but the other stopped her with a gesture.
"You did not, but in any case it would have been your duty, my dear. However, I do not approve of your going about the house so late at night, for Welch has an inordinate apprehension of burglars and is likely to blaze away promiscuously with his revolver if he hears any untoward sound. Be careful in future. And now good night, Betty, and thank you."
The reaction from the strain through which she had passed was so great that the girl all but collapsed when her own door had been closed once more behind her. She had forestalled Wolvert's betrayal, but would her version of the evening's encounter prevail against his narration, bearing as it must the stamp of truth?
Then another contingency presented itself to her mind. What if Wolvert's visit to the library had been, like her own, a surreptitious one? She remembered his significant phrase of the afternoon: "You have too much common sense to work for a mere pittance when you might share." She had fancied then that he was but voicing his own inmost thought, the aftermath of his open rebellion which Mrs. Atterbury had so imperiously quelled on the previous night. Had he turned traitor to the mysterious compact that bound him and all of their circle in a sinister secret alliance? Had she, by this betrayal, made of him an implacable enemy? Even if she had succeeded in lulling her employer's possible suspicion, her presence in the library had disclosed her true position in the household to Wolvert and she realized that a powerful weapon lay within his reach if it were to be war to the knife between them.
To her amazement, the matter was not again referred to in the days that immediately ensued and if Wolvert had gone to Mrs. Atterbury with his tale, or learned of the girl's disclosure, he gave no sign. While he did not openly avoid her, he made no effort to arrange a tête-à-tête, only his gaze burning with a strange intensity of questioning, filled her with troubled unrest.
Madame Cimmino treated the girl with frigid indifference, but unconsciously played into her hands by constant demands upon Wolvert's time and attention.