She put her soft, slim hand up to her soft, slim
throat.
"I could not get out," she repeated.
She ran to the door and began to beat on its panels. By this time,
she knew it would be no use and yet she beat with her hands until
they were bruised and then she snatched up a book and beat with
that. She thought she must have been beating half an hour when
she realized that someone was standing outside in the corridor,
and the someone said, in a voice she recognized as belonging to
the leering footman,
"May as well keep still, Miss. You can't hammer it down and no
one's going to bother taking any notice," and then his footsteps
retired down the stairs. She involuntarily clenched her hurt hands
and the shuddering began again though she stood in the middle of
the room with a rigid body and her head thrown fiercely back.
"If there are people in the world as hideous--and monstrous as
THIS--let them kill me if they want to. I would rather be killed
than live! They would HAVE to kill me!" and she said it in a frenzy
of defiance of all mad and base things on earth.
Her peril seemed to force her thought to delve into unknown dark
places in her memory and dig up horrors she had forgotten--newspaper
stories of crime, old melodramas and mystery romances, in which
people disappeared and were long afterwards found buried under
floors or in cellars. It was said that the Berford Place houses,
winch were old ones, had enormous cellars under them.
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