Suiting action to the thought, she stepped quietly from the niche in the wall, moved noiselessly along its surface, and came at length to another dungeon similar to She one she had occupied, except that it had no window in its oaken door. Fumbling with the bunch of keys, she took the first one around which her fingers fell and thrust it hurriedly into the lock. Would it open the haven to temporary safety? She struggled with it—turning it first to the left and then to the right. The footsteps were sounding nearer and nearer every minute, the voices were growing louder.
Frantic, she gave the key a final desperate twist, and as a sigh of relief escaped her lips the door swung open. Slipping through the aperture, she closed it softly after her and, panting from excitement and her exertions, turned and faced the recesses of her hiding-place.
It was black, pitch-black, except for a long ray of light that struggled in between the heavy door and its casing, but as Stella Donovan stood there in the gloom she was aware that she was not the only occupant of the cell. She crouched back, gripped in the hands of another fear, but the next moment her alarm was lessened somewhat by the sound of a soft, well-modulated voice.
"Who's that?" it said faintly.
Then followed the repeated scratching of a wet match, a flame of yellow light, which was immediately carried to a short tallow candle, and in the aura of its sickly flame Stella Donovan saw the face of a man with long, unkempt beard and feverish eyes that stared at her as though she were an apparition.
CHAPTER XXVI: THE REAPPEARANCE OF CAVENDISH
As her eyes became more accustomed to the light she saw that the stranger was a man of approximately thirty, of good robust health. His hair was sandy of colour and thin, and his beard, which was of the same hue, had evidently gone untrimmed for days, perhaps weeks; yet for all of his unkempt appearance, for all the strangeness of his presence there, he was a gentleman, that was plain. And as she scrutinised him Miss Donovan thought she beheld a mild similarity in the contour of the man's head, the shape of his face, the lines of his body, to the man whom, several weeks before, she had seen lying dead upon the floor of his rooms in the Waldron apartments.
Could this be Frederick Cavendish? By all that had gone before, he should be; but the longer she looked at him the less certain she was of the correctness of this surmise. Of course the face of the man in the Waldron apartments had been singed by fire so that it was virtually unrecognisable, thus making comparisons in the present instance difficult. At any rate, she dismissed the speculation temporarily from her mind, and resolved to divulge nothing for the time, but merely to draw the man out. Her thoughts, rapid as they had been, were interrupted by the fellow's sudden exclamation.
"My God!" he cried in a high voice, "I—I thought I was seeing things.
You are really a woman—and alive?"
Miss Donovan hesitated a moment before she answered, wondering whether to tell him of her narrow escape. This she decided to do.