Harry repressed an impulse to cry aloud. A thin streak of light showed between the edges of the silken hanging, through which the man in the mask was peering, and for a slender instant, under the crook's elbow, he could see into the room. The slender figure standing there under the chandelier was Echo Allen!
She was in a dark travelling dress and wore a light veil through which her profile looked strained and white. The unexpected sight of her intensified the haggard pain of heart which had come back to Harry with his awakening, and this was staggered by the knowledge that they two were together in this unknown dwelling.
The door closed upon the servant. Behind the portière the red-rimmed eyes peered questioningly into the eyelet holes of the black mask. They said as plainly as speech, "There is only the woman. Why not make for the open--now?" But the other was an older hand. The room had but the single door and the servant might be standing on the other side. Grim danger lurked in hue and cry, and there was always the chance that the woman might weary of waiting and go. He had a liking for the long chance. He shook his head.
Harry's straining ears caught now the dragging rustle of a skirt. Echo was moving slowly across the floor, and in a moment he saw her again through the slender opening. She was standing tense and straight, her hands wrung together, finger twisting against finger, before the desk telephone. He saw her hand go out to the instrument, then draw back as though it had been a poisonous snake. Then suddenly he saw her seize the transmitter and put it to her ear. The bell whirred.
There was a pause, in which she repeated the number, and in it Harry felt that her face had hardened and set, like some cooling plastic beneath an invisible mould.
In spite of his iron control, Harry could not repress a start. He knew now where he was! The house behind whose curtain he perforce skulked with a brace of thieves, was Cameron Craig's! And she, on this very day, had journeyed here too. A sense of an overfate, sardonic and unescapable, rushed upon him. What a topsy-turveydom of chance, what a dove-tailing of accident, had wrought for this strange _contretemps_! In the instant she waited a harrowing question stabbed him. What was she doing here, to-night, at midnight--in this environment which had bred unseemly stories--to enter which, under such circumstances, a woman must be unmindful of what should be most dear?