She put the book away and picking up the chart wrote on it in her neat hand: 11:30 P.M. Patient excitable. Pulse small and rapid. Refuses to take sedative.

She was still writing when the radio was turned on in Mrs. Fairbanks’s room. It made her jump. It was loud, and it blatted on her eardrums like a thousand shrieking devils. She stood it for ten minutes. Then she banged on the door.

“Are you all right?” she shouted.

To her surprise the old lady answered at once from just inside the door.

“Of course I’m all right,” she said sharply. “Mind you, stay out there. No running around the house.”

Quite definitely, Hilda decided, she did not like the case. She was accustomed to finding herself at night in unknown houses, with no knowledge of what went on within them; to being dumped among strangers, plunged into their lives, and for a time to live those lives with them. But quite definitely she did not like this case, or this house.

The house was not ghostly. She did not believe in ghosts. It was merely, as she said to herself with unusual vigor, damned unpleasant; too dark, too queer, too detached. And the old lady didn’t need a nurse. What she needed was a keeper, or a policeman.

Chapter 4

The radio went on until after midnight. Then it ceased abruptly, leaving a beating silence behind it, and in that silence Hilda suddenly heard stealthy footsteps on the stairs. She stiffened. But the figure which eventually came into view was tragic rather than alarming.

It was a woman in a black dinner dress, and she seemed shocked to see Hilda. She stood on the landing, staring.

“Has anything happened to Mother?” she half whispered.

Hilda knew her then. It was Marian Garrison, Janice’s mother, but changed beyond belief. She was painfully thin and her careful makeup only accentuated the haggard lines of her face. But she still had beauty, of a sort. The fine lines of her face, the dark eyes—so like Jan’s—had not altered. Given happiness, Hilda thought, she would be lovely.

She stood still, fingering the heavy rope of pearls around her neck, and Hilda saw that she was carrying her slippers in the other hand.

“It isn’t—she hasn’t had another—”

She seemed unable to go on, and Hilda shook her head. She picked up a pad from the table and wrote on it: Only nervous. She caught a bat in her room tonight.

Marian read it. Under the rouge her face lost what color it had had.

“Then it’s true!” she said, still whispering. “I can’t believe it.”

“It’s in that box.”

Marian shivered.

“I never believed it,” she said. “I thought she imagined it. Where on earth do they come from?” Then she apparently recognized the strangeness of Hilda in her uniform, settled outside her mother’s door. “I suppose the shock—she’s not really sick, is she?”

Hilda smiled.

“No. The doctor thought she needed someone for a night or two. Naturally she’s nervous.”