There came a clanking, a whirring as of wings invisible; then, from the wall clock, there boomed twelve heavy strokes—midnight.
She heard the slow tick-tock of that steady beat, and then, of a sudden she heard something else: the muffled ticking of a watch.
The sound was not loud—it came to her as through walls of silence—but it was nearer now. She was certain of it.
The door was closed; it was a heavy, sound-proof affair; the intruder, whoever he might be, had entered by the window. Rita Daventry knew that he was armed, and desperate—desperate with the cold courage of a cornered grizzly; a housebreaker, who, if attacked, would shoot his way out, reckless of consequences. To such a man, murder, as the price of his liberty, would be a little thing.
And with the thought she stiffened; her mouth opened, to release the scream, at the first sound of which she knew that aid would come, unthinking, swift, reckless, too, in its first fury of intrepid action.
But she would not summon that scream.
On the floor above, her husband was working now in his laboratory. But the man below would have the advantage of that midnight black; with the opening of the door, he would shoot him down with the ruthless, cold cruelty of a wolf.
But that was not all the reason. To Rita Daventry, alone now with this invisible menace of the dark, there had come, on a sudden, a thought to freeze her blood, the thought of Ronald Armitage.
It had been only the night before, at a studio tea, that Armitage had made the threat, or the promise, that came to her now with a sudden, cold prevision of tragedy. Armitage was young, reckless, debonair, of an engaging manner with women; and Rita had encouraged him—well, just a little, she told herself.
It was a fascinating game—in the playing. The paying—that would be another matter. And as if the words had been spoken in her ear, she was hearing now the smooth voice, thickened a trifle with his potations, with that faintly roughened, passionate undertone: