The sound came again. He knew this time that it was not the hallucination of overstrung nerves. Dragging himself up by the banister, he knocked on the first door of the right wing. There was no response. He knocked again, then boldly turned the knob. The door was locked. But through the deathly stillness there came, after a moment's pause, the sound that he had heard before. It was the sound of a woman's stifled sobbing.
CHAPTER III
Kenwick stood outside the closed door, a curious numbness stealing over him. Was it possible, he asked himself, that there had been some one in this house during the last twelve hours? Was it possible that this person was a woman? A solitary woman? It was unmistakably a woman's voice, and there was no sound of comforting or upbraiding or other evidence of companionship. As he knocked again at the door he wondered which one of them was the more startled by the presence of the other.
The sobbing had abruptly ceased. There was dead silence. Had he been of a superstitious temperament he might have suspected that his knock had somehow released from bondage an unhappy ghost who, wailing over a dead tragedy, had vanished leaving this spectral house as desolate as he had found it.
But Kenwick had no patience whatever with the occult. For him life was too all-absorbing and vivid an enterprise to tolerate the pastel existence of ghosts. Through the stillness his voice cut its way like a torchlight cleaving a path through a blind alley.
"What's the matter?"
As he hurled this question through the panel, he reflected that, being a woman, she would probably reply, "Nothing." But there was no response. Kenwick persisted. "Can I do anything for you?" And then a voice that was little more than a whisper came to him.
"Who are you?"
Conscious that the name would mean nothing to her, he gave it with a touch of irritation. She must know that he couldn't explain his invasion of her house through that inscrutably closed door. He had never thought of the place as belonging to a woman. Nothing that he had seen in it so far bespoke a woman's presence. The embarrassment that he had felt during the first hours of his imprisonment ebbed back and for the moment robbed him of further speech.