Free The Ivory Dagger by Patricia Wentworth Page B

were in the confusion of her mind, all mixed up with listening for the clock to strike, showing a light in the Blue Room, and waiting for Bill to knock on the window. Bill would take her away, and she need never see Herbert again…
    Aunt Sybil would make her. Herbert would make her. She couldn’t really get away from them.
    Bill would take her away. He would take her to Ray. Then she would have to marry him. He would make her. Ray would make her. She didn’t want to marry him.
    She knelt there for a long time. She didn’t know what to do. She went on kneeling until she began to feel giddy. Then she got up and huddled on the couch at the foot of the bed with the eiderdown pulled round her, because she was dreadfully cold, and you can’t really think when you are cold. She tried very hard to think, but it wasn’t any use. Bill said, ‘Come down and show a light, and I’ll take you away.’ Just for a moment she thought she could do it, but she couldn’t really. Sybil Dryden would never let her do it. However softly she opened her door, however softly she crept, Sybil would hear her. Sybil would come out of her room. Or Herbert. She had a most awful picture of being trapped in the dark, with no one to hear if she cried out. The room rocked and filled with mist. She couldn’t do it.
    And then quite suddenly it came to her that she needn’t do it. Bill would wait, and then he would go away. And he would come back in the morning, because if Bill said he had got to see her, he would go on till he did. And it wouldn’t be nearly so frightening in the daytime. And she could tell Adrian and ask him—and ask him—
    She drifted into an exhausted sleep. At first it was very deep. Then it began to be shot with dreams, like vague terrifying shadows—passing, fading, coming again. She did not know what they were, she only knew that they were dreadful. She moved among them like someone groping in a fog. She didn’t know where she was going or why. Something drove her. The dreams went too. They all drove together without any power to stop, like leaves driving in the wind—weak, fluttering leaves in a bleak and dreadful wind.
    Suddenly the wind stopped. There was a stillness. Lucy Ashton’s eyes looked into hers.
    She woke under a blaze of light. She was in the study. The overhead light was on, the room was as bright as day. Herbert Whitall was lying sprawled across the carpet. He was dead. She had never seen a dead person before, but she was very sure that he was dead. There was blood on his shirt-front. She drew a long sighing breath. Then she saw the blood on her white dress—a bright splash of it all down the front. Blood on her dress, and blood on her hand. It was her right hand, and it was dreadfully stained. On the floor at her feet lay the ivory dagger.
    CHAPTER XIV
    Bill Waring heard the half-hour strike from the village clock, two single notes so faint that if his ears had not been on the stretch he would not have heard them. The wind was setting that way, or he would not have heard them at all—a soft wind, rather high up. It drove the low cloud which darkened the face of the sky, and it moved and rustled the tree-tops, but down on the level of the drive, under the shadow of the pillared portico which screened the front door, the air scarcely stirred.
    Bill stood in the shadow of the portico. He could see the front door, the windows of the rooms on either side of it, and the windows of the flanking wings to the east and to the west. None of these windows showed any light at all. If he crossed the wide sweep of the drive and stood back from the portico he could see the whole front of the house. There was not a light in any of the rooms, nor had there been since he came. He had left his car outside the gate because turning it on the gravel was going to make too much noise, and if he left it in the drive it wouldn’t be facing the right way.
    He had been waiting a bare ten minutes, when the clock struck. It was a bit