"I will pass down the hall and stop an instant before the two doors we
are most interested in. When I pass Gilbertine's I will throw out my
right hand."
I stood on the threshold of his room and watched him. When the two doors
were well fixed in my mind, I went to my own room and prepared for my
self-imposed watch. When quite ready, I put out my light. It was then
eleven o'clock.
The house was very quiet. There had been the usual bustle attending the
separation of a party of laughing, chattering girls for the night; but
this had not lasted long, for the great doings of the morrow called for
bright eyes and fresh cheeks, and these can only be gained by sleep. In
this stillness twelve o'clock struck, and the first hour of my anxious
vigil was at an end. I thought of Sinclair. He had given no token of the
watch he was keeping, but I knew he was sitting with his ear to the
door, listening for the alarm which must come soon if it came at all.
But would it come at all? Were we not wasting strength and a great deal
of emotion on a dread which had no foundation in fact? What were we two
sensible and, as a rule, practical men thinking of, that we should
ascribe to either of these dainty belles of a conventional and shallow
society the wish to commit a deed calling for the vigour and daring of
some wilful child of nature? It was not to be thought of in this sober,
reasoning hour. We had given ourselves over to a ghastly nightmare, and
would yet awake.
Why was I on my feet? Had I heard anything?
Yes, a stir, a very faint stir somewhere down the hall--the slow,
cautious opening of a door, then a footfall--or had I imagined the
latter? I could hear nothing now.
Pushing open my own door, I looked cautiously out. Only the pale face of
Sinclair confronted me. He was peering from the corner of an adjacent
passage-way, the moonlight at his back. Advancing, we met in silence.
For the moment we seemed to be the only persons awake in the vast house.
"I thought I heard a step," was my cautious whisper after a moment of
intense listening.
"Where?"
I pointed toward that portion of the house where the ladies' rooms were
situated.
"That is not what I heard," was his murmured protest; "what I heard was
a creak in the small stairway running down at the end of the hall where
my room is."
"One of the servants," I ventured, and for a moment we stood irresolute.
Then we both turned rigid as some sound arose in one of the far-off
rooms, only to quickly relax again as that sound resolved itself into a
murmur of muffled voices. Where there was talking there could be no
danger of the special event we feared. Our relief was so great we both
smiled. Next instant his face, and, I have no doubt, my own, turned the
colour of clay, and Sinclair went reeling back against the wall.
A scream had risen in this sleeping house--a piercing and insistent
scream such as raises the hair and curdles the blood.