“Have you done with me for the present?” she asked, when they were in the hall.
“Oh, dear, dear, what a way of putting it!” exclaimed the doctor. “Dinner at six,” he added, with his politest emphasis, as she turned from him in disdainful silence, and slowly mounted the stairs to her own room.
A clock of the noiseless sort—incapable of offending irritable nerves—was fixed in the wall, above the first-floor landing, at the Sanitarium. At the moment when the hands pointed to a quarter before six, the silence of the lonely upper regions was softly broken by the rustling of Miss Gwilt’s dress. She advanced along the corridor of the first floor—paused at the covered apparatus fixed outside the room numbered Four—listened for a moment—and then unlocked the cover with the duplicate key.
The ope
