He called her name faintly in the silence, but only the echoes of the grim old house gave reply.
“She has fled the scene believing that I am dead, curse her!” he muttered, vindictively, dragging himself up out of the slippery pool of blood beneath him, and dropping heavily into an arm-chair. Then he discovered, to his surprise, that his neck had been carefully bandaged.
Not knowing, of course, of the presence of the detective who had come upon the scene the moment after he swooned, he was filled with wonder at the fact that Floy had apparently bandaged his neck.
“But she has escaped me again! The foul fiend must have helped her to drive that blow into my neck!” he muttered, angrily; adding: “But she would not have found me such an easy victim—I could have grappled with her and taken away the weapon—only that I was unnerved and trembling from the sights I had seen before I entered this room.”
He shuddered and glanced fearfully at the door, as though expecting some unearthly presence to appear.
“Alone in a haunted house!” he muttered, fearfully. “I that always laughed at spooks and phantoms! But I shall never deny them again. I have stumbled by accident on the secret of this old house, and I know that it has its restless ghost. What if I could turn my knowledge to account, and—— Ugh! what was that?”
He broke off, shuddering, for a fiend’s laugh seemed to echo in the stillness—the laugh of a fiend who has tempted some poor soul to its eternal ruin. It was more than the unstrung nerves of the man could bear.
With a muttered imprecation, he seized his hat from the floor, where it was lying, and groped his way out of the dismal house into the sweet night air.
But as he closed the door and turned from the accursed threshold, that fiendish, mocking laugh seemed to follow him with taunting echoes down the road.
Slowly and painfully he made his way home, thankful that the pall of midnight covered the earth, so that none saw him in the blood-soaked garments he wore.