Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/91

 ran toward the darkened villa. Once inside the door she fell upon the stone flagging and lay there so overcome by panic that she was unable to rise.

At ten o'clock, sitting in the vast empty room which she called her boudoir Mrs. Weatherby lost patience and began ringing the great brass bell with which she was accustomed to summon the servants. Not only was she out of patience, but disturbed. Miss Fosdick had never before remained away sulking for so long a time, and there came to Mrs. Weatherby that faint and unlikely suspicion which sometimes raised its head, that her companion might have run away.

She had not gone. There was a timid knock on the door and Miss Fosdick entered, looking, Mrs. Weatherby thought, pale and agitated.

"It seems to me, Gertrude, that you're old enough not to sulk."

"I wasn't sulking, Aunt Henrietta."

"I've finished my exercises long ago. I thought you were never coming."

Miss Fosdick did not answer, but took up the hair-brush and began her nightly task of soothing Mrs. Weatherby's frayed nerves. The large empty room was lighted by two candles and an oil-lamp which stood on the dressing-table before an antique mirror in which Mrs. Weatherby's countenance gazed out, blotched and hazy, from the age not so much of Mrs. Weatherby's face as of the quicksilver. The great religious experimenter had