Page:Arthur Stringer - The Door of Dread.djvu/48

 the same shadowy loggia. There, finding the wide spaces of that balmy-aired veranda unoccupied, he groped his way to a huge rustic chair beside the railing, and after swayingly communing with nature and essaying several fruitless efforts to reform his dangling tie-ends, subsided into a sleep that seemed as untroubled as it was profound.

Out of the shadowy doorway behind the sleeper stole, a few moments later, the equally shadowy figure of a woman in a golden-orange opera-cloak trimmed with sable. She advanced slowly and noiselessly to the railing, close beside the rustic chair. She turned toward the chair, stood motionless and murmured an almost inaudible sentence or two.

Her words, however, brought no answer from the recumbent figure with the straggling tie-ends. So the woman looked quietly about, stepped closer to the sleeping man and stooped over him.

A tingling of nerves needled through Wilsnach's cramped body as he felt the touch of that white hand. The fingers slipped like a snake in under his coat, but he neither moved nor lifted an eyelid. He was conscious of the fact that the woman's breath was fanning warmly at his face, that he lay within the aura of some soft and voluptuous aroma, that