Page:Arthur Stringer - The Door of Dread.djvu/91

 swung about on her with a startled little noise in his throat, strangely like the grunt of a feeding pig confronted by a farm-collie.

Yet he stared at her quietly enough, without any further movement of the body. Sadie Wimpel, equally motionless, stared back at the man confronting her. He was big and blond, with yellow eyelashes and a number of small intersecting scars on either cheek.

She knew, even before she completed her study of the grim and mocking mouth and the pale blue eyes with their serpent-like fortitude, that the man was Keudell himself.

"What are you doing in this house?" he quietly demanded. Yet there was menace in his very calmness, the menace of an alert mind alive to any contingency.

"I'm waiting to get out," was Sadie's prompt and quite truthful reply.

He calmly locked the door and pocketed the key. But never once did the studious pale eyes leave her face. "How did you get in?"

"I came for work," was the prompt reply.

"What kind of work?"

"House-work."