Page:Arthur Stringer - The Door of Dread.djvu/207

 window curtains, an empty cardboard box and a faded cotton umbrella with a broken ferule. She stared down at them with disgust. Then she returned the couch to its former position, and sat down on it, deep in thought.

Then she slipped off her wrap, pinned up the skirt of her Collet gown, and having vigorously but determinedly worked a steel from her corsets, crossed to the door-frame against which the transom-rod was screwed. Then patiently and laboriously, using her corset-steel as a screw-driver, she removed the fastenings which held the lower end of this rod to the wood. The upper fastenings were beyond her reach. But she was satisfied with being able to lever away a good two-thirds of the rod, twisting and bending the solid iron until it broke under the strain.

When she shook it free of its fasteners she held in her hand an instrument of either offense or defense that was two feet in length and almost a quarter of an inch in thickness. She weighed it in her hand, studiously, as a golf player weighs a driver, and then stared even more studiously about the room in which she found herself a prisoner.

Her first point of attack was the door, on which,