“They’re all right,” Vance assured her. “But why did you think your brother had met the same fate as Miss Julia and yourself?”
She turned her gaze slowly to him.
“I don’t know—I just felt it. Ever since I was a little girl I’ve imagined horrible things happening in this house. And the other night I felt that the time had come—oh, I don’t know how to explain it; but it was like having something happen that you’d been expecting.”
Vance nodded understandingly.
“It’s an unhealthy old house; it puts all sorts of weird notions in one’s head. But, of course,” he added lightly, “there’s nothing supernatural about it. It’s only a coincidence that you should have felt that way and that these disasters should actually have occurred. The police, y’ know, think it was a burglar.”
The girl did not answer, and Markham leaned forward with a reassuring smile.
“And we are going to have two men guarding the house all the time from now on,” he said, “so that no one can get in who hasn’t a perfect right to be here.”
“So you see, Ada,” put in Von Blon, “you have nothing to worry about any more. All you have to do now is to get well.”
But her eyes did not leave Markham’s face.
“How do you know,” she asked, in a tense anxious voice, “that the—the person came in from the outside?”