Margate took the hands of the nurse, slipping the vial into one of them, and for five minutes he remained in whispered conversation with her, giving her such instructions as served his purpose. Then he extinguished the hall light and went to his room.
Half an hour passed.[Pg 34]
The silence in the crime-cursed house was unbroken.
Its gloom was relieved only by a faint thread of light under the door of the chamber in which Madame Clayton was lying.
Then, for the hundredth part of a second, a swift gleam appeared on the servants’ stairway. It shot downward, danced for an instant over the stairs and wall, then vanished.
It appeared again in about a minute. It lingered for several seconds. A figure was vaguely discernible in the gloom back of the swiftly moving ray, a figure stealing noiselessly down the stairs—that of Peterson, the house butler.
He crept down as silently as a shadow, as if he was far from being a novice in such stealthy work.
He stole to the door of Madame Clayton’s chamber, crouching there in the darkness, and peered through the keyhole.
He could see the form of the unconscious woman lying on the bed.
He saw, too, that of the nurse bending above her, watching her intently, with an empty hypodermic syringe in her hand.