The room was pitch black. I caught no glimpse
of Mabel standing there. Frances turned to me with a hurried whisper,
"Billy, you will be careful, won't you?" and went in. I just had time to
answer that I would not be long, and Frances to reply, "You'll find us
here" when the door closed and cut her sentence short before its end.
But it was not alone the closing door that took the final words.
Frances--by the way she disappeared I knew it--had made a swift and
violent movement into the darkness that was as though she sprang. She
leaped upon that other woman who stood back among the shadows, for,
simultaneously with the clipping of the sentence, another sound was also
stopped--stifled, smothered, choked back lest I should also hear it. Yet
not in time. I heard it--a hard and horrible sound that explained both
the leap and the abrupt cessation of the whispered words.
I stood irresolute a moment. It was as though all the bones had been
withdrawn from my body, so that I must sink and fall. That sound plucked
them out, and plucked out my self-possession with them. I am not sure
that it was a sound I had ever heard before, though children, I half
remembered, made it sometimes in blind rages when they knew not what
they did.
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