Again she reached for the match holder, but it was empty. Softly opening the drawer, she felt in the back until her fingers grasped the pistol. Carefully she drew it out and transferred it from her right hand to her left. There was an unacknowledged relief in Billie's heart that there were no matches. She felt she would rather get out of the library in the dark than make any investigations with a match. Once in the hall she would decide what to do.
She was morally certain now that someone else was in the room. She could see nothing, hear nothing, but in the dark she felt the presence of another human being. She recalled Nancy's experience.
"Perhaps it wasn't her imagination, after all," she thought.
The thing was to get back to the door and out of it. Billie wished with all her soul she had never come in at all. It had been a reckless, silly notion. Why should her father need a pistol? After all, it was just some roisterer on his way home from the festival. She had heard that sake, the Japanese brandy, made the men who drank it wild, no doubt wild enough to shoot off a pistol in the suburbs where there were no policemen about to interfere.
And all because she had heard this pistol shot, she had obeyed a foolish impulse to find her father's pistol. How reckless! How foolhardy! How stupid! Because, to come right down to a fine point, here she was shut up in a perfectly huge room, as black as the pit, with—someone else!
Never in all her experience had Billie been so frightened. Her knees knocked together and her head was quite giddy as she made her way unsteadily toward the door, still with the pistol in her left hand.
But she seemed to have lost all sense of direction. Groping with her right hand, she encountered a chair. There had been no chairs in the way before,—was it an hour ago or only a minute?
It would be better to get to the wall and feel her way along the shelves until she reached the door.
Why was she so panic-stricken? After all was she so sure about that other person crouching somewhere—anywhere?
Then the thing happened that she had known was going to happen all the time.