Thirty seconds were wanted to complete the cycle of the day, when one of
the listless hands thrown across the back of the chesterfield opened and
closed spasmodically. The fur at the bosom of the midnight visitor began
rapidly to rise and fall.
Then, with a choking cry, the woman struggled upright; her hair, hastily
dressed, burst free of its bindings and poured in gleaming cascade down
about her shoulders.
Clutching with one hand at her cloak in order to keep it wrapped about
her, and holding the other blindly before her, she rose, and with that
same odd, groping movement, began to approach the writing-table. The
pupils of her eyes were mere pin-points now; she shuddered convulsively,
and her skin was dewed with perspiration. Her breath came in agonized
gasps.
"God!--I... am dying... and I cannot--tell him!" she breathed.
Feverishly, weakly, she took up a pen, and upon a quarto page, already
half filled with Leroux's small, neat, illegible writing, began to
scrawl a message, bending down, one hand upon the table, and with her
whole body shaking.
Some three or four wavering lines she had written, when intimately,
for the flat of Henry Leroux in Palace Mansions lay within sight of the
clock-face--Big Ben began to chime midnight.
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