She thought that she screamed. But she made no sound. There was a man standing behind her, and smiling at her with an odd, sinister smile. But it was not that alone that froze her into a terror as cold as death, that held her motionless where she stood, like a woman of wood. It was that the man was Tom.
“Well, what’s the matter?” Tom asked, slowly and easily. His voice restored Gabrielle to some part of her senses, and she managed a sickly smile in return.
“You frightened me!” Gabrielle answered, her heart still pumping violently with the shock, and with a sort of undefined uneasiness, bred of the dark night, and the howling wind, and her solitariness far up here in the lonely old house.
Tom had lighted the lamp.
“Sit down,” he said. “I want to talk to you!”
“Oh, Tom—it’s after ten!” Gabrielle said, fluttering.
“Well, what of it? Here——” He pushed an armchair for her, and Gabrielle sat down in it, and blew out her candle. Tom opened the stove, dropped wood and paper inside, and the wind in the chimney caught at it instantly, with a roar. “I wanted to talk to you,” Tom added, “without Sylvia or any of the others around. They’re always around!”
One of them would be welcome now, Gabrielle thought, in a sort of panic. For Tom’s face looked stern and strange, and there was a rough sort of finality expressed in his manner that was infinitely disquieting.
She did not speak. She sat like a watchful, bright-eyed child, following his every word and every movement. Tom would not hurt her—Tom would not kill her—said her frightened heart.
“Here’s what I want to know, Gabrielle,” he began, abruptly, when he had taken a chair close to her own. “What’s the idea? You know all about me—you can’t keep up this stalling for ever, you know.”