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Page 32
It was some fifteen minutes later that her message was brought to me.
I followed the maid to a quaint little octagonal apartment, and Greba
Eltham stood before me, the candlelight caressing the soft curves
of her face and gleaming in the meshes of her rich brown hair.
When she had answered my first question she hesitated in pretty confusion.
"We are anxious to know what alarmed you, Miss Eltham."
She bit her lip and glanced with apprehension towards the window.
"I am almost afraid to tell father," she began rapidly.
"He will think me imaginative, but you have been so kind.
It was two green eyes! Oh! Dr. Petrie, they looked up at me
from the steps leading to the lawn. And they shone like the eyes
of a cat."
The words thrilled me strangely.
"Are you sure it was not a cat, Miss Eltham?"
"The eyes were too large, Dr. Petrie. There was
something dreadful, most dreadful, in their appearance.
I feel foolish and silly for having fainted, twice in two days!
But the suspense is telling upon me, I suppose.
Father thinks"--she was becoming charmingly confidential,
as a woman often will with a tactful physician--"that
shut up here we are safe from--whatever threatens us."
I noted, with concern, a repetition of the nervous shudder.
"But since our return someone else has been in Redmoat!"
"Whatever do you mean, Miss Eltham?"
"Oh! I don't quite know what I do mean, Dr. Petrie.
What does it ALL mean? Vernon has been explaining to me
that some awful Chinaman is seeking the life of Mr. Nayland Smith.
But if the same man wants to kill my father, why has
he not done so?"
"I am afraid you puzzle me."
"Of course, I must do so. But--the man in the train.
He could have killed us both quite easily! And--last night
someone was in father's room."
"In his room!"
"I could not sleep, and I heard something moving.
My room is the next one. I knocked on the wall and woke father.
There was nothing; so I said it was the howling of the dog
that had frightened me."
"How, could anyone get into his room?"
"I cannot imagine. But I am not sure it was a man."
"Miss Eltham, you alarm me. What do you suspect?"
"You must think me hysterical and silly, but whilst father and I have been
away from Redmoat perhaps the usual precautions have been neglected.
Is there any creature, any large creature, which could climb up the wall
to the window? Do you know of anything with a long, thin body?"
For a moment I offered no reply, studying the girl's pretty face,
her eager, blue-gray eyes widely opened and fixed upon mine.
She was not of the neurotic type, with her clear complexion
and sun-kissed neck; her arms, healthily toned by exposure
to the country airs, were rounded and firm, and she had the agile
shape of a young Diana with none of the anaemic languor which breeds
morbid dreams. She was frightened; yes, who would not have been?
But the mere idea of this thing which she believed to be in Redmoat,
without the apparition of the green eyes, must have prostrated
a victim of "nerves."
"Have you seen such a creature, Miss Eltham?"
She hesitated again, glancing down and pressing her finger-tips together.
"As father awoke and called out to know why I knocked,
I glanced from my window. The moonlight threw half the lawn
into shadow, and just disappearing in this shadow was something--
something of a brown color, marked with sections!"
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