I heard the bedroom door slam behind her, heard the key turn in the lock.
As she rushed past me and up the stairs, the patter of her feet fell on my ears like the soft padding of Toi Wah’s footsteps that had filled my youthful years with fear. My blood chilled at this old, until now, forgotten sound.
What craven fear was this? I tried to pull myself together, to reason rationally. Fear of a cat long dead, whose mouldering bones were upstairs on the attic floor! What was there to fear? Was I going mad?
The slamming of the bedroom door, the turning of the key in the lock, instantly changed my thought and roused in me an overwhelming fury. Was I to be locked out of my own bedroom—our bedroom?
I rushed up the stairs. I knocked on the door, I rattled the knob. I pounded with my fists on the panels. I shouted, “Open! Open the door!”
In the midst of my furious onslaught, the door suddenly opened and a sleepy-eyed little figure stood aside to allow me to enter.
“Why, Robert!” she exclaimed, as I stood there, bewildered and ashamed, a furious conflict of doubt, fear and uncertainty raging in my mind. “What’s the matter? Where have you been? I was sound asleep, and you frightened me, shouting and pounding at the door.”
Was I deceived? Partly. But in her eyes! Ah! In her eyes was that sly, inscrutable catlike look that I had never seen there until that day. And now that look never leaves them, it is there always!
“What were you doing below stairs—alone—in my grandmother’s room?” I stammered.
She arched her brows incredulously.