A Little Treachery

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Catherine Hare came downstairs while it was still dark on an April morning, when there was a loud crying of birds from the woods. She went down the stairs very quietly, as she had done several times during the night, until she was in the little kitchen and before the door opening out of it into the other room in the basement, which they had called the garden room; the only comparatively quiet place in the house, so that she had put up a bed there. Now a fearful silence welled from that room. It was not sleep which so held its breath. No one slept. No one was dead.

But, after all, she could not face it, and turning at the foot of the basement stairs, which had led her straight down into the kitchen, she crept up again. She had not the courage, her utmost effort could not nerve her, to pursue to its end the impulse which had brought her to that point.

When she regained the top floor, she stood on a landing not more than three feet square. Two doors facing each other opened off this, and a vague lightening of the air, hardly to be called light yet, a mere thinning of opacity, showed the staircase to some extent, a precipitous little staircase between walls. The right-angled turn at its lower end was also visible, for it led directly into the room, the middle room on the road level, and there was a window just inside. This, with undrawn curtains, also admitted the nascent light. In that room was the front door.

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