“Why not? You’ll be back by midmorning. Miss Cameron can rustle up breakfast for me, like she did today.”
Her face brightened for almost the first time since the typist’s arrival. “Can I!”
“And I can build my own fire when I’m ready to start work in the morning. Just see that there’s enough wood on hand.”
It was nearly eleven when he drove slowly back to the house alone, after dropping off his loyal retainer at the depot. The German shepherd, aloof as usual, sat in the seat beside him. The countryside was as still as a grave. The road was empty; no speeding city taxi passed him tonight.
He put the car away himself, opened the house door with his own key. It seemed strange; he was so used to having Sam do these little things for him. The Cameron girl was standing out at the foot of the stairs, listening. A sound like frightened, low-pitched sobbing reached him from above.
She smiled inscrutably, thumbed the staircase. “The old maid’s walking out on you.”
“What d’you mean?”
“She’s packing up to go. She’s got the heebie-jeebies. Somebody threw a rock through her window warning her to clear out.”
“Why didn’t you go up and calm her at least?” he snapped.
“I didn’t have to. She came tearing down here to me in an 1892 flannel nightie and practically jumped into my lap for protection. That’s only the trailer you’re listening to now. I looked up the trains for her, as long as she wanted to leave that bad.”
“It would have surprised me very much if you hadn’t.”
She ignored that. “Some mischievous kids must have done it, don’t you think?”
“Undoubtedly,” he said as he started up. “Only there don’t happen to be any for miles around here.”
Miss Kitchener was packing things into the Gladstone bag, between whiffs at a bottle of smelling salts. There was a fist-size rock on the table, and a crudely penciled scrap of paper that had been wrapped around it lay nearby. He read the message on it.
Get out of that house before morning or you won’t live to regret it.
One of the small partition panes in the window was shattered into a star-shaped remnant.
“You’re not going to let a little thing like that get you, are you?” he suggested.
“Oh, I couldn’t sleep a wink tonight after this!” she snuffled. “I’m nervous enough other nights as it is, even in the city.”
“It’s just a practical joke.”
She paused uncertainly in her packing. “Wh-who do you suppose—?”
“I couldn’t say,” he said decisively, as though to discourage further questioning on that score. “Did you look out, try to see who was down there at the time?”
“Dear me, no! I ran for my life down the stairs as soon as I’d finished reading it. I... I feel so much better now that you’re back, Mr. Holmes. There’s something about having a man in the house—”
“Well,” he said, “I don’t want to oblige you to stay here if you’re going to be frightened and uncomfortable. I’m willing to drive you in to the station and you still have plenty of time to make the quarter-of-twelve train. You can do the typing next week in the city, when I come back. It’s entirely up to you.”
The avenue of escape he was offering obviously appealed to her. He saw her look almost longingly toward her open bag. Then she took a deep breath, gripped the foot rail of the bed with both hands as if to steel herself. “No,” she said. “I was sent out here to do this work for you, and I’ve never yet failed to carry out anything that was expected of me. I shall stay until the work is complete!” But she spoiled the fine courage of the sentiments she was expressing by stealing a surreptitious after glance at the shattered window.
“I think you’ll be all right,” he said quietly, with a half-formed little smile at the corner of his mouth. “The dog’s an effective guarantee that no one will get in the house from outside. And my own room’s right down at the other end of the hall.” He turned to go, then turned back to her again from the doorway. “There’s a small revolver kicking around in one of my bureau drawers somewhere; would you feel any better if I looked for it and let you keep it here with you tonight?”
She gave a squeak of repulsion, palmed her hands at him hastily. “No, no, that would frighten me more than the other thing! I can’t bear the sight of firearms of any description, I’m deathly afraid of them!”
“All right. Miss Kitchener,” he said soothingly. “You’re showing a considerable amount of gallantry in remaining — even though there’s really nothing to be worried about — and I won’t forget to speak favorably to Mr. Trent about it.”
The Cameron girl was in the far corner of the living room, turning over a rifle in her hands, when he appeared unexpectedly in the doorway a few moments later. His descent must have been quieter than he realized.
He clasped hands behind his back, tilting the tail of his coat up out of the way. “I wouldn’t monkey around with any of those if I were you. I think I already told you last night they’re kept loaded.”
She looked over at him, hesitated a moment before putting it down, even turned full face toward him with it still clasped in her hands but crosswise to her own body.
He didn’t move. There was a dancing quality in his eyes, as though his muscular coordination was prepared to meet a need for instantaneous action, but he didn’t show it in any other way.
She stood the gun up against the wall, ostentatiously brushed her hands. “Sorry. Everything I seem to do is wrong.”
His hands unclasped, the skirt of his coat fell flat. “Oh, no, I wouldn’t say that. Everything you seem to do is right.”
He sat down in the “inspiration chair.” She hovered around uncertainly in the background. “Am I intruding?”
“You mean at the moment or by and large?”
“I mean at the moment. By and large I am, I don’t need to be told that.”
“No, you’re not intruding at the moment. I don’t mind your being in here.”
“Where you can keep an eye on me,” she finished for him with a satiric laugh. Her eyes went up toward the raftered ceiling. “Did she decide to stay?”
“Much to your regret.”
She sighed elaborately. “We either understand each other too well or not at all.”
That was the last thing either of them said. The fire had dwindled to a garnet glow, dark as port. The rest of the room was all blue shadow. Just their two faces stood out, pale ovals against the surrounding gloom. A cricket chirped in the velvety silence outside that pressed down, smothered the house like a feather bolster.
He rose to his feet at last, and all you could see rising was the oval of his face; the rest of him already blended into the shadows. He went outside to the stairs, and the scuffing measure of his tread was audible going slowly up them. She stayed on in there, with the garnet embers and the guns.
He closed the door of his room after him, but he didn’t put on the light. It was hard to make him out in the India-ink blackness. White suddenly peered faintly over there by the door, in two long columns and a little triangular wedge, and he’d doffed his coat without moving away from before the door seam. A chair shifted, and the white manifestations ebbed lower on it but still there up against the door. A shoe dropped an inch or two, with the sound a shoe makes; then its mate.
The cricket went on outside, and the silence went on inside, and the night went on outside and in. Once, an hour before dawn, a faint disembodied stirring of air seemed to come into the room, but not from the direction of the window, from the direction of the door — as though he had eased it narrowly open without permitting the latch to make any sound. A floorboard creaked in the distance, somewhere far below. Maybe it was just the wood contracting from the increasing night-long coldness. Or maybe stealthy pressure had been put upon it.