Criminals -- Fiction; Detective and mystery stories; Fu Manchu, Doctor (Fictitious character) -- Fiction
She bit her lip and glanced with apprehension towards the window.
"I am almost afraid to tell father," she began rapidly. "He will think
me imaginative, but you have been so kind. It was two green eyes! Oh!
Dr. Petrie, they looked up at me from the steps leading to the lawn.
And they shone like the eyes of a cat."
The words thrilled me strangely.
"Are you sure it was not a cat, Miss Eltham?"
"The eyes were too large, Dr. Petrie. There was something dreadful,
most dreadful, in their appearance. I feel foolish and silly for
having fainted, twice in two days! But the suspense is telling upon
me, I suppose. Father thinks"--she was becoming charmingly
confidential, as a woman often will with a tactful physician--"that
shut up here we are safe from--whatever threatens us." I noted, with
concern, a repetition of the nervous shudder. "But since our return
someone else has been in Redmoat!"
"Whatever do you mean, Miss Eltham?"
"Oh! I don't quite know what I do mean, Dr. Petrie. What does it ALL
mean? Vernon has been explaining to me that some awful Chinaman is
seeking the life of Mr. Nayland Smith. But if the same man wants to
kill my father, why has he not done so?"
"I am afraid you puzzle me."
"Of course, I must do so. But--the man in the train. He could have
killed us both quite easily! And--last night someone was in father's
room."
"In his room!"
"I could not sleep, and I heard something moving. My room is the next
one. I knocked on the wall and woke father. There was nothing; so I
said it was the howling of the dog that had frightened me."
"How could anyone get into his room?"
"I cannot imagine. But I am not sure it was a man."
"Miss Eltham, you alarm me. What do you suspect?"
"You must think me hysterical and silly, but whilst father and I have
been away from Redmoat perhaps the usual precautions have been
neglected. Is there any creature, any large creature, which could
climb up the wall to the window? Do you know of anything with a long,
thin body?"
For a moment I offered no reply, studying the girl's pretty face, her
eager, blue-gray eyes widely opened and fixed upon mine. She was not
of the neurotic type, with her clear complexion and sun-kissed neck;
her arms, healthily toned by exposure to the country airs, were rounded
and firm, and she had the agile shape of a young Diana with none of the
anaemic languor which breeds morbid dreams. She was frightened; yes,
who would not have been? But the mere idea of this thing which she
believed to be in Redmoat, without the apparition of the green eyes,
must have prostrated a victim of "nerves."
"Have you seen such a creature, Miss Eltham?"
She hesitated again, glancing down and pressing her finger-tips
together.
"As father awoke and called out to know why I knocked, I glanced from
my window. The moonlight threw half the lawn into shadow, and just
disappearing in this shadow was something--something of a brown color,
marked with sections!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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