“I ask you why you have moved it.”
She wrote these four words on the slate: “The wall is damp.”
Anne looked at the wall. There was no sign of damp on the paper. She passed her hand over it. Feel where she might, the wall was dry.
“That is not your reason,” she said.
Hester stood immovable.
“There is no dampness in the wall.”
Hester pointed persistently with her pencil to the four words, still without looking up—waited a moment for Anne to read them again—and left the room.
It was plainly useless to call her back. Anne’s first impulse when she was alone again was to secure the door. She not only locked it, but bolted it at top and bottom. The mortise of the lock and the staples of the bolts, when she tried them, were firm. The lurking treachery—wherever else it might be—was not in the fastenings of the door.
She looked all round the room; examining the fire place, the window and its shutters, the interior of the wardrobe, the hidden space under the bed. Nothing was any where to be discovered which could justify the most timid person living in feeling suspicion or alarm.
Appearances, fair as they were, failed to convince her. The presentiment of some hidden treachery, steadily getting nearer and nearer to her in the dark, had rooted itself firmly in her mind. She sat down, and tried to trace her way back to the clew, through the earlier events of the day.