Woburn sat listening. There was nothing else to be done; and at least his
listening was a mute tribute to the trouble he was powerless to relieve.
It roused, too, the drugged pulses of his own grief: he was touched by the
chance propinquity of two alien sorrows in a great city throbbing with
multifarious passions. It would have been more in keeping with the irony
of life had he found himself next to a mother singing her child to sleep:
there seemed a mute commiseration in the hand that had led him to such
neighborhood.
Gradually the sobs subsided, with pauses betokening an effort at self-
control. At last they died off softly, like the intermittent drops that
end a day of rain.
"Poor soul," Woburn mused, "she's got the better of it for the time. I
wonder what it's all about?"
At the same moment he heard another sound that made him jump to his feet.
It was a very low sound, but in that nocturnal silence which gives
distinctness to the faintest noises, Woburn knew at once that he had heard
the click of a pistol.
"What is she up to now?" he asked himself, with his eye on the door
between the two rooms; and the brightly-lit keyhole seemed to reply with a
glance of intelligence. He turned out the gas and crept to the door,
pressing his eye to the illuminated circle.
After a moment or two of adjustment, during which he seemed to himself to
be breathing like a steam-engine, he discerned a room like his own, with
the same dressing-table flanked by gas-fixtures, and the same table in the
window.
Pages:
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169