"Madam, what is it you want?"
Her expression never changed, and I who was watching her as intently as it is given to a human being to watch, I swear that her lips did not move, but she answered clearly and distinctly, although in a voice that was like a sigh of the darkness on a country road in the summer when the night has been holding its breath by the hour, and she said:
"Is Miss Russell here?"
"Ah," exclaimed all three of us together, and with intonation of relief, "you have made a mistake. Miss Russell lives on the floor below."
"Oh!" she said, and turned about in the hall as if to go down stairs. Hopkins stepped out to turn up the hall-light, but before he reached it that happened which froze him to the spot where he stood. The woman turned slowly. Then she went swiftly down the. seven steps of the upper half of the flight, and instead of turning at the midway landing to go on down she went straight through the end wall of the house and out of sight.
"She's fallen!" I cried, and down the stairs we leaped together. For one wild instant we all thought perhaps we had not seen aright, and that she had pitched over the balustrade into the open hallway. To the bottom we raced and back again, and saw nothing more than a frightened mouse scampering to its hole in the corner. There was our door wide open, and the gas-jet flaring up, and the end wall sound and whole where the woman went through. We went into the parlor and faced one another without speech, and the silver chime of the clock on the mantel struck four.
As we went out in the morning after breakfast we met the janitor in the hall.
"How is Miss Russell to-day? " asked Catchings.
"She died, sir, at 4 o'clock this morning," answered the man. He took a photograph out of his pocket and showed it to us. "She was a handsome girl, sir," he said.
It was a photograph of the woman who went through the wall.
