Page:Weird Tales volume 32 number 01.djvu/43

 simply saw something that looked like it; but this one, no! I am going to keep on telling myself that I never saw it before and at last I will believe it."

He emptied the bottle. And then he must have slept.

Waking with a start, he looked at his watch. He held it to his ear, and cried, "It stopped! I must have forgotten to wind it. It stopped at midnight and I never knew it. And now I do not know what time it is. I may have to wait only a few minutes or hours or an eternity till the lawyer comes for me. If only I knew what time it was I would be happier. How long was I asleep? How long must I stay awake?"

And then he heard a tap, tap, tap, tap, little heels walking on a wooden floor, drawing nearer, more distinct; little heels tapping in mincing steps on a clean wooden floor. They sank noiseless in the thick dust of the house, and all the house was covered with thick carpeting of century-old dust except this room. His head whirled; he shut his eyes and shook his head to dear it. And then he opened his eyelids and there was a woman walking toward the table. She was dressed, in flounces and furbelows, hair-ribbons, pantofles and jewelry of the past century. In one hand she carried a candlestick with lighted taper, in the other hand a bottle of wine. She placed them both on the table.

And then she took a handkerchief and started to dust the table and the pictures and the glasses. She went around the room like a little wren, making the place spotless, and all was quiet save for the tap-tap-tap of her little heels on the waxed and spotless wooden floor. Finally she replaced the half-burned candles with new ones. She poured two glasses of wine and silently placed one in front of the man.

"Well," she said finally, "how very, very odd to find you here! Who would have thought that you would be here? And why did you come? For the two million, I suppose. I might have known it. You were always so anxious to do anything for money. And now that you are here, and I am here, shall we drink to each other as we did in the past? You will recall the wine and the vintage. Or have you had too much whisky to recall anything? That was the trouble with you. You would have been a fine man and a faithful lover, only you had to drink too much at the wrong time. Drain the glass. You need it. But I will not drink mine, for you may need all in the bottle to keep your brain going till morning."

He picked the glass up and slowly drained it, and then started to laugh.

"Think of you being here!" he sneered. "I might have known it. Whenever there was any deviltry you were somehow at the bottom of it. But I am going to be rich now, and I will give you half of it if you go away and leave me here till the morning. You give me your name and address and I promise you that I will give you half of it. Come on, be a good girl and get out."

She simply laughed at him. "You have not changed at all," she said, "and you still think that all a woman thinks of is money. Drink another glass of the wine. It is perfect. Do you remember when we drank this same wine in the little patio in northern Italy?"

"I remember very well. That was the third time."

"And I told you there would be one more time and then I left you, and now you meet me here. How appropriate! I sent you the newspaper with the advertisement in it; I knew that would bring you back to America. And of course I knew about the will. I could have had half the estate had I been willing to disclose my identity. I did not care for the