Page:Henry rideout--The siamese cat.djvu/132

 my lips!" he thought, staring downward, while streets and shops reeled past the carriage like shapes in a dream. "I should be dead some two hours … but for Laura's chit."

That night he changed his room to the opposite wing, and from midnight on, paced barefoot in the dark verandah. Between moon-set and dawn, a black shape swarmed up the post below his former quarters, vanished within, reappeared, slid down to earth. Two other shadows joined it, and moved off, whispering, towards the river. In the farthest corner of the compound, a bush gradually swelled, divided, threw off the shadow-bulk of a man standing on watch. Then noiseless, faint, like the last vestige of a thing imagined, it moved away slowly after the other three. For a second, crossing the smoky light of the servants' door, it focused as the silhouette of Borkman.