“Pah!” I exploded angrily. His literal sense of honor, his narrow conscience which led him into inexpediency, seemed to me a part of a feminine rather than of a masculine nature, and more ridiculous than high-minded.
“Well, wait here, then,” I snapped back at him as Margaret Murchie opened the door. “If necessary I will call you.”
The old servant said nothing until we were in the hall, but her face was white with fear. I read on it the word she had transmitted to us by telephone. And whether or not it was my imagination, I felt the presence of a crisis and a forewarning that the inexplicable events which I had observed were now to come to some explosive end.
Margaret’s first words, said to me with her two large hands raised as if to ward off a menace, were not reassuring.
“The scratching noise!” she cried. “The soft scratching noise!”
I turned her toward me by grasping her shoulder.
“No hysteria,” I said firmly. “Every second may count. Tell me quickly what has happened.”
“Yes, sir,” she said, bracing herself. “I’ve done as you told me—very faithful. I went this morning to get my orders from her. I don’t say the voice that answered me weren’t hers.”
“Well, would you say it was?” I asked savagely.
“I think I would, sir,” she replied. “It was strange and changed and soft. I could hardly hear it. She said she didn’t require anything. So I came away.”