Page:Arthur Stringer - The Door of Dread.djvu/216

 out for the brass candlestick. Then she advanced again toward the open safe- front, with her intent gaze fixed on the small shining area of the pink-fleshed skull.

He neither saw her nor heard her as she stood so closely behind him. He was crouched, with blithe wheezes of contentment, over a little bundle of folded white sheets and blue-prints. Around these, after a voluptuous stare at the closely inscribed white pages, he snapped a rubber band to hold them together.

It was at the precise moment that the rubber band snapped against the folded and sorted papers that his world suddenly went out, like a bubble bursting in mid-air.

For it was at that moment that the woman so close behind him, swinging with all her force, brought the heavy candlestick down on the wavering high light along the pink-fleshed skull.

It was only at the moment of the impact itself that she closed her eyes. In the next breath she was watching him go over sidewise, slowly and gently, and quite without sound or outcry. She saw him lie there on his side, with one hand thrown out, in a child-like attitude of inconsequential weariness.