Page:Arthur Stringer - The Door of Dread.djvu/335

 And as she waited she remembered that she was very thirsty.

The tension of her position also began to tell on her tired body. She found standing irksome. So she groped her way about the desk and lifted one of the chairs back next to the wall which enfiladed her. She sat down in this chair, with the automatic still in her hand, still waiting.

She thought she heard a vague sound or two, but of this she could not be sure. The silence tended to unnerve her. She became obsessed with the thought that vast and intricate tissues of intrigue were being woven on the looms of silence about her. Countless ghostly contingencies, as the minutes dragged on, stood serried and sinister in the gloom above her. Inactivity became an ache. The fingers of her restless left hand toyed for a moment with the open cigarette-box on the desk-top. She took up one of the tiny cylinders, tapped its end against the desk-edge and tried to moisten it with her lips. Then her hand went back to the match-holder. She sat motionless for a minute or two, hemmed in by the velvety blackness about her. Then she deliberately took up a match, struck it and lighted the cigarette which still drooped from between her lips.