strange voice speaking in an undertone--a voice I thought I never had
heard before. I crept up along the hall and listened. Everything was
still. But in spite of all, I began to feel that there was more than one
person on the other side of those thick white panels. I knew it was
folly to suppose such a thing, but I began to have the idea that
another--a woman or a talkative child--was with her behind the locked
door.

Once this impossible idea took hold of me, I did all I could to get a
peep within the room. I had been bringing the meals, that were not
enough to keep a kitten alive, to the crack she would open to take them
in. Believe me, that the very first time I tried to poke my head around
where I could see, that practice stopped, and my mistress, in a dull and
heavy voice, told me to leave everything on the floor and go away. It
seemed that she had grown suspicious. It seemed that she had something
to conceal. I brooded over the strangeness of it all until I began to
wonder how this other person, whatever or whoever it might be, had ever
entered the house. I even began to wonder whether creatures could be
drawn from the air and put into the form of flesh and blood.

Finally came my chance to look. Three days ago, at about eleven o'clock
in the morning, I heard the lock of her door slide over and a moment
later she called to me. It was long after I had done her errand and had
gone away that I began to be haunted by the thought that there had been
no sound of the lock turning again. I heard the voices. I thought of the
possibility that I might now softly open the door.

"A look! A look!" I heard my own tongue saying, as I tiptoed up the
stairs and as I twisted the door knob by little turns, each one no more
than the width of a hair.

I had been right about the lock. I discovered it at last when the door
yielded. I looked in through a narrow crack. On the far side of the
bare, dim room was my mistress on her knees, her clasped hands resting
on the floor in front of her. She had not heard me and she seemed to be
writhing as if in pain. Her skin was as pale as death. The whole picture
gave a body the feeling that she had been thrown forward by some strong
hand. I felt sure at that moment that I had not been mistaken--that
some other person was there. I almost believed I saw its shadow falling
across the floor. But after I had looked from one end to the other of
the chamber, I knew at last that no one else was there