Hilda’s cheerfulness suffered a setback. She picked up what she had laid out, tucked under her arm the five-pound Practice of Nursing—a book which on night duty induced a gentle somnolence which was not sleep—and went back to Janice’s door.

The girl also was standing by her window, staring out. So absorbed was she that she did not hear Hilda. She rapped twice on the doorframe before she heard and turned, looking startled.

“Oh!” she said, flushing. “I’m sorry. Are you ready?”

Hilda surveyed the room. Janice had evidently made an attempt to make it cheerful. The old mahogany bed had a bright patchwork quilt on it, there were yellow curtains at the window, and a low chair by the fireplace looked as if she had upholstered it herself in a blue-and-gray chintz. But there was little sign of Janice’s personal life, no photographs, no letters or invitations. The small desk was bare, except for a few books and a package of cigarettes.

“All ready,” Hilda said composedly. “Did the doctor leave any orders?”

For some reason Janice flushed.

“No. She’s not really sick. Just a sedative if she can’t sleep. Her heart’s weak, of course. That’s why it all seems—so fiendish.”

She did not explain. She led the way forward, and Hilda took her bearings carefully, as she always did in a strange house. The layout, so far as she could see, was simple. The narrow hall into which her room and Jan’s opened had two rooms also on the other side. But in the front of the house the hall widened, at the top of the stairs, into a large square landing, lighted in daytime by a window over the staircase, and furnished as an informal sitting-room. Two bedrooms occupied the front corners of the house, with what had once been a third smaller room between them now apparently converted into bathrooms.

Janice explained as they went forward.

“My uncle, Carlton Fairbanks, and his wife have these rooms across from yours and mine,” she said. “They’re out of town just now. And Mother has the other corner in front, over the library.”

Unexpectedly she yawned. Then she smiled. The smile changed her completely. She looked younger, as if she had recaptured her youth.

“You go straight to bed,” Hilda said sternly.

“You’ll call me if anything goes wrong?”

“Nothing will go wrong.”

She watched the girl as she went back along the hall. In her short skirt and green pullover sweater she looked like a child. Hilda grunted with disapproval, put down her impedimenta—including Practice of Nursing—on a marble topped table, looked around for a comfortable chair in which to spend the night and saw none, and then finally rapped at her patient’s door.

Chapter 3

Her first real view was not prepossessing. Mrs. Fairbanks was dressed in an ancient quilted dressing-gown, and she looked less like an alert but uneasy terrier, and more like a frightened and rather dowdy old woman. Nor was her manner reassuring.

“Come in,” she said shortly, “and lock the door. I have something to show you. And don’t tell me it came down the chimney or through a window. The windows are barred and screened and the chimney flue is closed. Not only that. There is a wad of newspaper above the flue. I put it there myself.”