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ut that alert face with its closed eyes--as there is about a house with its blinds drawn to hide evil enterprises. So she sat for interminable minutes, and it seemed to Sylvia that she was not surprised when she heard the sound of tapping at the back door. She was not surprised, yet a feeling of engulfing horror came over her at the sound. Her father opened his eyes now; and it seemed really that he had been resting. "The boy from the drug-store," he said. "They were to send me some medicine." He seemed to be gathering his energies to get up and admit the boy from the drug-store, but Sylvia sprang to her feet and placed a restraining hand on his shoulder. "Let me go," she said. There was an expression of pity and concern for her father in her eyes when she got to the door and laid her hand on the latch. She was too absent-minded to observe at first that the bolt had been moved into its place, and that the door was locked. Her hand had become strange to the mechanism before her, and she was a little awkward in getting the bolt out of the way. But the expression of pity and concern was still in her eyes when she finally pulled the door toward her. And then she seemed to have known all the time that it was Fectnor who stood there. CHAPTER XIII He slipped past her into the room, and when she uttered a forlorn cry of defeat and shrank back he gripped her by the wrist. Holding her so, he turned where he stood and locked the door again. Then he crossed the room, and closed and bolted that other door which opened into the room where Sylvia's father sat. Then he released her and stood his ground stolidly while she shrank away from him, regarding him with incredulous questioning, with black terror. She got the impression that he believed himself to have achieved a victory; that there was no further occasion for him to feel anxious or wary. It was as if the disagreeable beginning to a profitable enterprise had been gotten over with. And that look of callous complacence was scarcely more terrifying than his silence, for as yet he had not uttered a word. And yet Sylvia could not regard herself as being really helpless. That door into her father's room: while it held, her father could not come to her, but she could go to her father. She had only to wait until Fectnor was off his guard, and touch the bolt and make her escape. Yet she perceived now, that for all Fectnor's seeming complacence, he remained
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