Meanwhile, however, Miss MacDonald—like Miss Lyons, the “fever girl”—had gratified her craving for notoriety.
HAMILTON CRAIGIE Spins Another Yarn in His Inimitable Style
MIDNIGHT BLACK
Rita Daventry sat bolt upright in her bed, her ears strained against the singing silence, breath indrawn sharply through her parted lips.
There had been no sound, save as a sound heard in dreams, but as she sat there, rigid, tense, in the thick darkness, leaning forward a little in the great bed, she was certain that she was not alone.
Someone or something was in the room.
The blackness was like an invisible wall; it pressed upon her eyelids now like a gigantic and smothering hand. And then, all at once, she heard it: the brief clink of metal upon metal; a rustle, like the flicker of a wind-blown leaf.
Simply by reaching forth her hand she could have pressed the wall switch, flooded that midnight blackness with the blazing effulgence of the electrolier, but she could not. Eyes strained against that velvet black, she crouched now, in the immensity of the great bed, the silken case of the sheets turned suddenly to ice, her pulses hammering to the tension of her hard-held breathing, there in the stifling dark.