CHAPTER X
LEGERDEMAIN
With a mind half distracted, the battlefield of a dozen unhappy emotions of which the most coherent were seething self-reproach and frantic irritation with Trego (why must it have been he, of all men?) Sally inconsiderately left the two to conclude their quarrel without an audience--took to her heels incontinently and sped like a hunted shadow across the open lawn. She flung through the side door and left it wide, stumbled blindly up-stairs to her bedchamber door, and shut this last behind her with no anticipation so fond as that of solitude and freedom to cry her eyes out.
But she had no more than turned from the door toward her bed, in the same movement shrugging off her black cloak and letting it fall regardless to the floor, when she became aware that solitude was no more in that room, that she shared it with an alien Presence--a shape of misty pallor, filling the armchair, silhouetted vaguely against the moonlight rectangle of the window.
And she faltered and stopped stock-still, with a strangled whimper, due in part to sheer surprise, but mostly to semi-superstitious dread.
The Presence did not move; but she was frightfully aware of the fixed regard of its coldly hostile eyes.
"Who are you?" she demanded in a choking whisper. "What are you doing here? What do you want?"
"Where have you been?" the Presence retorted in a level voice instantly identified as that of Mrs. Standish. "What have you been doing"--a spectral arm gestured vaguely toward the terrace--"out there?"
Sally took firm hold of herself and mustered all her wit against this emergency.
"I went out," she said slowly, "because I couldn't sleep, and--everything seemed so lovely. . . ."