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But the twilight hour spent with them was always a disturbing one. . . . After all the amusements, all the day's running and playing, to sit in the dusk almost motionless upon my tiny chair, with eyes wide open, uneasily watching for the least change in the shadows, especially on that side of the room where the door opened on the dim stairway, was very painful to me. . . . I am sure that if my grandmother and aunt had known of the melancholy and terrors which the twilight induced in me, they would have spared me by lighting the lamp, but they did not know my sufferings; and it was the custom of the aged persons by whom I was surrounded, to sit tranquilly at nightfall in their accustomed places without having need for a lighted lamp.
She fancied she understood his reticence on the memorable evening when he had stumbled on the stairway, and was not altogether displeased by it. He had, it seemed, been over-sensitive, for he was but slightly lame, while she had reasons for surmising that he would realize there was no great necessity for the self-sacrifice in time.
"Excuse me, but you didn't see that automobile," he said, as he released her. Shaken, she went on through several streets to find herself at length confronted by a pair of shabby doors that looked familiar, and pushing one of them open, baited at the bottom of a stairway to listen.
The Runt shot a hurried glance at the stairway, and licked his lips as though they had gone suddenly dry. "My Gawd, I " He gasped, and shrank hastily back against the wall beside Jimmie Dale. The door from the street had opened noiselessly, instantly. Black forms bulked there then a rush of feet and at the head of half a dozen men, the face of Inspector Clayton loomed up before Jimmie Dale.
He began to climb the stairs laboriously, with Frau Nirlanger's light figure flitting just ahead of him. At the bend in the stairway she turned and looked down on us a moment, her eyes very bright and big. She pressed her fingers to her lips and wafted a little kiss toward us with a gesture indescribably graceful and pathetic. She viewed her husband's laborious progress, not daring to offer help.
He listened, but no sound came down the dimly illumined stairway. A new thing was pressing upon him now. It rode over the shock of tragedy, over the first-roused instincts of the man-hunter, overwhelming him with the realization of a horror such as had never confronted him before. It gripped him more fiercely than the mere killing of Kedsty.
Christophe shook the iron railing which closed the stairway on the river, and called. His mother heard him, opened one of the windows of the back shop, and asked what he was doing there. Christophe answered that he was cold and wanted to get in. "Ha! my master," said the Burgundian maid, "you went out by the street-door, and you return by the water-gate. Your father will be fine and angry."
Take any department of learning or skill; take, for instance, the knowledge of languages, the universal alphabet, philology. On the great stairway, at Padua, stands the statue of Elena Cornaro, professor of six languages in that once renowned university. But Elena Cornaro was educated like a boy, by her father.
"Where were they? And how did you get 'em without a six-shooter?" "They was driftin' up the pass to say 'How-d'you-do? from the back stairway. I borrowed a gun from one o' them. I asked 'em to come along with me and they reckoned they would." The booming of a rifle echoed in the rocks to the left. From out of them Jessie McRae came flying, something akin to terror in her face.
Readjusting the gown she had partly thrown off, she seized her cloak and wrapped it about her. Then she fled up the stairway, and into the calm, starlit night to where her runabout awaited her, the victim of her own wrong-doing. It was a happy trio of girls that, shortly before midnight, climbed into the Deans' automobile, in which Mr. and Mrs.
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