After that she stood in the lighted doorway, watching him, until he
disappeared in the gloom of the slope. She called good-by, and he
answered her. The door closed.
And he went down into the valley, a hand of foreboding gripping at his
heart.
XX
With a face out of which all color had fled, and eyes filled with the
ghosts of a new horror, Miriam Kirkstone stood before Keith in the big
room in the house on the hill.
"He was here--ten minutes," she said, and her voice was as if she was
forcing it out of a part of her that was dead and cold. It was
lifeless, emotionless, a living voice and yet strange with the chill of
death. "In those ten minutes he told me--that! If you fail--"
It was her throat that held him, fascinated him. White, slim,
beautiful--her heart seemed pulsing there. And he could see that heart
choke back the words she was about to speak.
"If I fail--" he repeated the words slowly after her, watching that
white, beating throat.
"There is only the one thing left for me to do. You--you--understand?"
"Yes, I understand. Therefore I shall not fail."
He backed away from her toward the door, and still he could not take
his eyes from the white throat with its beating heart.
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