A low, tremulous, wheedling cry, strangled sometimes into a moan—it froze every face and turned every eye to stone.
“What’s that?” gulped Eve Bartholomew. . . .
“Where is it?” asked Belvoir, and one could tell that the “stick of dynamite” had not much breath to spare.
But no one seemed to have the breath or the brain to answer him. My own belief for a moment was that it proceeded from a plane above our heads, instead of from somewhere in the long portrait-lined passage outside the Hall of the Moth. This seemed to be Pendleton’s notion, too, for with a tense “upstairs!” our host moved to the nearest door to the corridor. But Alberta Pendleton, dismayed (like all of us, no doubt) by the thought of the hovering menace that had shadowed Highglen House, hurried across to her husband and clung to him, positively clung to him, as I have seen actresses do in plays.
“No, Crofts dear—no, no! Wait—let someone go with you!”
“It’s up there,” declared Pendleton with steel-trap enunciation. “The damned thing’s come again—up there.”
“That’s why you mustn’t go.”
“It’s up there,” he said doggedly, and tugged to loose himself. But she took step for step with him, finally turning in his path with her back against the door.
“We’ll all go,” said Maryvale.
“All the men,” said Cosgrove. “The women lock the doors behind us.”