Page:Arthur Stringer - The Door of Dread.djvu/340



T WAS five days later that Miss Mabel Poole, six short weeks out of her Victoria Hospital training-school, found herself alone with a patient. And the first point that made itself apparent to the young trained nurse was that this patient's room was disturbingly dark. The second point that came to her attention was that this darkness seemed crowded with cut flowers, giving it the heavy air of a hot-house. And the third fact to impress itself on her was that the bell-boy who had carried her bag down the hotel hallway had not waited for his tip. He had gone, and in going had softly closed the bedroom door behind him. In that flight, she felt, there was something disquieting and stealthy; it was like being treacherously abandoned by her last ally.

Miss Mabel Poole's apprehensions as to that tyrannical new patient of hers did not decrease as she stared across the darkened room. She was, in 324