But there was no other way. Boldly the girl poked her finger through the aperture, tearing the netting ruthlessly until she could reach the hook and raise it. Then, withdrawing her scratched and bleeding hand, she opened the door softly and stole in, only to be immediately seized and oppressed by a sensation of guilt and even of fright. Pausing only a moment, however, she made her way noiselessly down the passage to the door of the room she knew to be that of the minister’s wife. It was ajar and she knocked timidly.
Absolute silence save for the loud ticking of the clock and the yet louder beating of her heart. Screwing her courage, Anna knocked again.
“Bell?” called out a strange, hoarse voice that accorded ill with the vision of the girl-wife.
“No’m. It’s me—Anna. It’s the other Miller girl—Rusty’s sister, you know,” murmured Anna faintly. “Please may I come in? I want to—tell you something.”
Without waiting for an answer, she pushed the door wide and entered a large, bare, gloomy looking chamber, darkened and musty-smelling though one window was open a few inches. For a minute she stood motionless, unable to make out anything clearly in the dimness. Then, as suddenly as if a blind had been raised or a match struck she saw the dark figure of the minister’s wife dimly silhouetted against the dun background.
Mrs. Langley—if indeed it were Mrs. Langley?—had raised herself from the cushions of a padded arm chair and was staring at the intruder in mingled amazement and horror. And the girl, her heart in her mouth, stood as if transfixed and stared back. It was as if she had heard a tremendous explosion or witnessed a silent one (as one does in a dream) and found herself standing in the midst of a mass of wreckage—which might have been the shattered fragments of the bottle of cologne-water with which she had in fancy bathed the white brow of the pale, romantic invalid she had pictured.
“Please, may I come in? I want to—tell you something.”
This woman’s figure, outlined against the lowered blind, was that of a witch, the shoulders being curved almost in an hump and the emaciated profile resembling the terrible nutcracker contour commonly associated with the broomstick. Her dark hair, streaked with yellowish grey, was strained back from her yellow face into a tight little wad on the back of her head. Her lips were colourless, her cheeks appallingly hollow. Her sunken eyes, set in deep, greenish cavities, burned fiercely beneath her frowning brow. She looked as old and ugly as a sybil and to Anna as wicked.
It was she who first recovered sufficiently to speak.