Page:Harold Macgrath--The girl in his house.djvu/119

 on the servants' floor. "Hark!" it said; and after a little while it said, "Hark!" again. Some one was in the storeroom.

She rose to her feet, went over to her bureau, and armed herself with an electric torch and a small automatic. She then opened her door carefully and stepped out into the hall. There was enough light from the front window to guide her to the stairs. She was afraid, but she went on. Hadn't her father always told her to go on when she felt fear? To love truth was easy, to be kind was equally easy; but this thing called fear, which insisted upon recurring, which must be conquered and reconquered eternally! A draught of cold air struck her. She was conscious of it, but did not pause to investigate the source.

She mounted the stairs slowly and lightly. She did not want any of them to call out a warning, though they were all more or less talky, these stairs. She held the torch in her left hand and the automatic in her right, tensely. Her knees were shaking and she possessed a great longing to run back to her room and hide under the bedclothes. But that invisible force which had always been