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Updated: May 29, 2025
Geoffrey waited, looking after him, and turning over in his mind what had been done up to that time. "All right, so far," he said to himself. "I didn't ride in the cab with her. I told her before witnesses I didn't forgive her, and why I had her in the house. I've put her in a room by herself. And if I must see her, I see her with Hester Dethridge for a witness.
While Blanche was whispering to her uncle, a second private conference of the purely domestic sort was taking place between Lady Lundie and the butler, in the hall outside the library door. "I am sorry to say, my lady, Hester Dethridge has broken out again." "What do you mean?" "She was all right, my lady, when she went into the kitchen-garden, some time since.
She could only adopt, in good faith, Sir Patrick's assumed point of view, and believe, on the evidence of her own observation, that Sir Patrick was right. Toward dusk, Anne began to feel the exhaustion which was the necessary result of a night passed without sleep. She rang her bell, and asked for some tea. Hester Dethridge answered the bell.
"But Miss Blanche is not your mistress," she went on, sternly. "You are very much to blame for answering Miss Blanche's inquiries about Miss Silvester." Hester Dethridge, perfectly unmoved, wrote her justification on her slate, in two stiff sentences: "I had no orders not to answer. I keep nobody's secrets but my own."
Hour by hour, the morning wore on, and he made no attempt to communicate with her, Stranger still, Hester Dethridge never appeared. The servant came up stairs to say goodby; and went away for her holiday. Shortly afterward, certain sounds reached Anne's ears from the opposite side of the passage. She heard the strokes of a hammer, and then a noise as of some heavy piece of furniture being moved.
Hester Dethridge dragged herself free from Anne, advanced, with her candle in her hand, and threw open Geoffrey's bedroom door; returned to the head of the stairs; and stood there, firm as a rock, waiting for him. He looked up, as he set his foot on the next stair, and met the view of Hester's face, brightly illuminated by the candle, looking down at him.
She never answered him, and never looked toward him. He made once more for the place in the wall; and stopped midway between it and his bed stopped, and cast a backward glance over his shoulder. Hester Dethridge was stirring at last. With no third person in the room, she was looking, and moving, nevertheless, as if she was following a third person along the wall, from the corner.
The servant opened the door of the dining-room. Breakfast was on the table. Geoffrey was standing at the window. Hester Dethridge was waiting, posted near the door. He came forward with the nearest approach to gentleness in his manner which she had ever yet seen in it he came forward, with a set smile on his lips, and offered her his hand! She was not prepared for this.
Dethridge had gone out next, and had come back with something in a jar which she had locked up in her own sitting-room. Shortly afterward, a working-man had brought a bundle of laths, and some mortar and plaster of Paris, which had been carefully placed together in a corner of the scullery.
The brief entries referred to the various occasions on which Hester Dethridge had again and again seen the terrible apparition of herself, and had again and again resisted the homicidal frenzy roused in her by the hideous creation of her own distempered brain.
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