[The Long Night by Stanley Weyman]@TWC D-Link book
The Long Night

CHAPTER IX
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Still all was silent.
He mounted more boldly then, and he was within four steps of the top--whence, turning his head a little, he could command the passage--when a sound arrested him.

It was a sound easily explicable though it startled him; for a moment later Anne Royaume appeared at the foot of the upper flight of stairs, and moved along the passage towards him.
She did not see him, and he could have escaped unnoticed, had he retired at once.

But he stood fixed to the spot by something in her appearance; a something that, as she moved slowly towards him, fancying herself alone, filled him with dread, and with something worse than dread--suspicion.
For if ever woman looked as if she had come from a witch's Sabbath, if ever girl, scarce more than child, walked as if she had plucked the fruit of the Tree and savoured it bitter, it was the girl before him.
Despair--it seemed to him--rode her like a hag.

Dejection, fear, misery, were in her whole bearing.

Her eyes looked out from black hollows, her cheeks were pallid, her mouth was nerveless.


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