Page:Arthur Stringer - The Door of Dread.djvu/325

 traversed scores of feet where she had covered only as many inches.

Still again, as she advanced on her shoeless feet, she encountered the square of a door-frame between which she could feel the panels of the closed door itself. She explored it with fastidious finger-tips, wondering what could lay behind it.

She was standing close in beside it, with one ear pressed intently against its panel, when a sudden sound startled her. She could hear the rattle and clink of portière-rings and the sound of a key being quickly turned in a lock. The next moment a door opened and a fulcrum of light cascaded out across the darkness of the hallway. It was the door, she saw, past which she had so recently and so innocently worked her way. It was wide open by this time, and two figures had stepped out into the hall. One was Keudell and the other was Andelman. She had a clear vision of them in silhouette, and at the same time her quick eye caught sight of the banister and the stair-head for which she had been searching, not five paces away from her.

Instinctively she flattened her body against the