Page:Arthur Stringer - The Door of Dread.djvu/364

 the more patient-eyed woman sitting alert and intent before a glazed white dial, with a dictaphone receiver clamped over her ear. She reminded the heavy-eyed girl of a crystal-gazer sitting above her globe, with her thoughts on the incomprehensible. Then, as her brain grew drowsier, it made her think of the huddled figure in one corner of Michelangelo's Last Judgment—a figure that was both tragic and brooding and had haunted her mind from an art print in her childhood home.

Then the watcher, with her utter absence of movement, seemed to become something grotesque, merging into a gargoyle on a lonely tower, crouching silent and cynic, over a world wrapped in darkness. Then the attenuated chain of thought melted into sleep itself, and the picture became a blank.

The girl was wakened from that sleep by a shake from Sadie Wimpel's hand. She sat up at once, for she was used to sudden calls.

"What is it?" she asked.

"Where'd yuh go to send that telegram?" demanded the other woman. It was plain to see that something had happened to disturb her.

"Why?"