"How did she _know_?" asked Spike.
"Know what--about Napoleon? Maybe she made it up!"
"No, about my looking out the window at the sacred inscription."
"Oh!" Marie had forgotten this was the original question. "Oh, she
watched you!"
Spike's face lengthened with amazement.
"Through your window. She would climb up...."
"_What!_" exclaimed Spike.
"... up the drain pipe," Marie assured him. "She is a wonderful
climber--holds on with her claws and walks up the wall on her limber
feet. She would hang from your window sill like a bat!"
Spike sat up and clutched his hair with both hands.
"What?" he cried. "She didn't! Did she really? Oh, my God!"
He remembered lying in his bed listening fearfully to a series of
cautious, scraping noises. Suppose he had gone to the window--as he
almost had!--and seen that hideous old woman hanging from his window
sill. She would have looked up into his face and grinned!... Then the
four black hairs had been hers!
"Oh, my God," repeated Spike. "How often did she come?"
"Every night! She would wait until you had gone to sleep and then she
would climb over the sill and sit on your bed and look at your face
with the light of the magic ring on it!
"She thought of suggesting a decision to you while you slept. But here
again she could not decide. She would whisper into your ear, 'Wish
for gold!' and then thinking this a stupid decision to reach after
centuries of meditation, she would whisper, 'Wish for happiness!' and
then she would sit there gnawing her knuckles, and finally make still
another suggestion, so that one canceled the other and none had any
effect on you.
"She longed to wake you so that you two could talk together about
things like reality--and time, and distance. But she was afraid if
she shook you awake you might scream and then she would have been as
frightened as you.... She would have sat in a corner, whimpering. I
have seen her when she was frightened...."
"Holy Gosh!" breathed Spike. His head ached with a confusion of
thoughts and images growing from Marie's story.
"After a while," Marie continued, "she would get up and slip out the
window--down the drain pipe, three stories to the garden, climb the
stone wall, run along it like a cat and drop down into an alley leading
into the _rue Notre Dame des Champs_."
"She would not face the fact that when you met her in the street, you
did not want to talk to her. She said you acted queerly but that your
manner was brusque to every one. She said you were so deeply occupied
with reaching a decision that you did not want to speak to anybody.
'Don't you think so?' she would ask me. And I would say, 'Yes, he is
worried and nervous!'
"She finally did speak to you," Marie added.
"And _scared_ me! All of a sudden somebody comes up and does something
impossible! I wasn't afraid of what she could do to me, but what my
imagination would do to me after she got through!"