Page:Wadsworth Camp--the gray mask.djvu/85

Rh woman arose and seemed to set in violent motion the atmosphere of this tragic chamber.

The cry was repeated. Garth shivered. He had a quick uncomfortable fancy that the woman was making horrid and superhuman efforts to overcome some obstacle to expression.

"I wish she'd keep quiet," he thought. "Confound it! There's no acting about that. She wants to talk and can't."

He returned to his scrutiny of the room. Its disordered condition suggested a struggle before Randall had fired the shots and dropped the revolver there at the end of the table.

A circle of no great radius would have enclosed the scattered and faded roses. No—not all. One bud lay farther off, nearer the bedroom door.

Garth tiptoed to it, stooped, and picked it up, examining it curiously while he tried to reconstruct from it an active picture of the tragedy. The stem had been broken away, indicating, since Treving or Randall had probably worn it, the close and desperate nature of their struggle. For it was not like the roses from the vase. They were of a larger variety and wider open, and this lay, he estimated, near the spot where Treving, conquered and killed, had fallen.

As he stooped there, reflecting, constantly troubled by the impotent sounds from the next room, a ray of late sunlight penetrated the foliage, entered the open window, and gleamed upon a silvery thread apparently in the carpet. In his haste to reach this