de, she saw
with painful distinctness how readily she had lent herself to be the
dupe and tool of the man she called her father. Nothing that he had
urged upon her at the St. Simon had now the least weight in her
understanding; all his argument was now seen to be but the sheerest
sophistry, every statement he had made and every promise fairly riddled
with treachery; hardly a phrase he had uttered would have gained an
instant's credence under the analysis of a normal intelligence. He could
have accomplished nothing had she not been without sleep for nearly
twenty-four hours, with every nerve and fibre and faculty aching for
rest. But, so aided--with what heartless ease had he beguiled and
overreached her!

Tears, hot and stinging, smarted in her eyes while she fumbled with the
fastenings of her attire--tears of chagrin and bitter resentment.

As soon as she was ready and composed, she opened the door very gently
and stepped out into the hall.

It was a short hall, set like the top bar of a T-square at the end of a
long, door-lined corridor. The walls were of white, plain plaster,
innocent of paper and in some places darkly blotched with damp and
mildew. The floor, though solid, was uncarpeted. Near at hand a flight
of steps ran down to the lower floor.

After a moment of hesitation she chose to explore the long corridor
rather than to descend at once by the nearer stairway; and gathering her
skirts about her ankles (an instinctive precaution against making a
noise engendered by the atmosphere of the place rather than the result
of coherent thought) she stole quietly along between its narrow walls.

Although some few were closed, the majority of the doors she passed
stood open; and these all revealed small, stuffy cubicles with grimy,
unpainted floors, grimy plaster walls and ceilings and grimy windows
whose panes were framed in cobwebs and crusted so thick with the
accumulated dust and damp of years that they lacked little of complete
opacity. No room contained any furnishing of any sort.

The farther she moved from her bedroom, the more close and stale and
sluggish seemed the air, the more oppressive the quiet of this strange
tenement. The sound of her footfalls, light and stealthy though they
were, sounded to her ears weirdly magnified in volume; and the thought
came to her that if she were indeed trespassing upon forbidden quarters
of the mean and dismal stronghold of some modern Bluebeard, the noise
she was ma