Then, in the still, sunny room, the girl turned to face the East. And her husband saw her lips move as though speaking, but heard no sound.
“What on earth are you saying there, all to yourself?” he demanded at last.
She turned her head and looked at him across her left shoulder.
“I asked Sansa to help me.... And she says she will.”
Cleves nodded in a dazed way. Then he opened a window and leaned there in the sunshine, looking down into Madison Avenue. And the roar of traffic seemed to soothe his nerves.
But “Good heavens!” he thought; “do such things really go on in New York in 1920! Is the entire world becoming a little crazy? Am I really in my right mind when I believe that the girl I married is talking, without wireless, to another girl in China!”
He leaned there heavily, gazing down into the street with sombre eyes.
“What a ghastly thing these Yezidees are trying to do to the world—these Assassins of men’s minds’!” he thought, turning away toward the door of his bedroom.
As he crossed the threshold he stumbled, and looking down saw that he had tripped over a white sheet lying there. For a moment he thought it was a sheet from his own bed, and he started to pick it up. Then he saw the naked blade of a knife at his feet.