Читать книгу The House of Spies онлайн

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She drew an arm-chair before the hearth, took some logs from the oak log-box and piled them against the fire-back. Benham lay and watched her out of the corners of his eyes. She sat herself down with the firelight playing upon her black dress, and touching her throat and face. Perhaps she had outwatched her own wakefulness, for presently she fell asleep, her head resting against the chair back, her face turned toward the window.

Jasper Benham could not sleep. The aching of his broken arm, and a feeling of restlessness kept him awake. Moreover, he was very conscious of the nearness of the girl sleeping in the chair; and the alluring strangeness of her white face seemed sharpened by his own pain. He became feverish and nervously alert, unable to master the thoughts and conjectures that made a whirligig of his brain. He began to question the history of Stonehanger as a sick man busies himself with patterns on a wall. Was it true that Inchbold had killed his wife here fifty years ago? Was it true that two men had fought a duel to the death in this very room? What of the tales told of the haunting horror of the house, a horror that had emptied it and kept it empty for twenty years? Nance Durrell, sleeping before the fire, seemed to contradict all this. The ebbing and flowing of her breath between the red lips of youth might exorcise such ghost tales.