I had slept in this way for a little more than an hour, when I
suddenly started up broad awake. [In] the intense quiet of the room
I had heard a sound like the chinking of glass, and I fancied that
Milly had stirred.

There was a table near her bed, with a glass of cooling drink and a
bottle of water upon it. I thought she must have stretched out her
hand for this glass, and that in so doing she had pushed the glass
against the bottle; but to my surprise I found her lying quite
still, and fast asleep. The sound must have come from some other
direction--from the dressing-room, perhaps.

I went into the dressing-room. There was no one there. No trace of
the smallest disturbance among the things. The medicine-bottles and
the medicine-glass stood on the little table exactly as I had left
them. I was very careful and precise in my arrangement of these
things, and it would have been difficult for the slightest
interference with them to have escaped me. What could that sound
have been--some accidental shiver of the glass, stirred by a breath
of wind, one of those mysterious movements of inanimate objects
which are so apt to occur in the dead hours of the night, and which
seem always more or less ghostly to a nervous watcher? Could it have
been only accidental? or had Mrs. Darrell been prowling stealthily
in and out of that room again?

Why should she have been there? What could her secret coming and
going mean? What purpose could she have in hovering about the sick
girl? what could her hatred profit itself by such uneasy
watchfulness, unless-- Unless what? An icy coldness came over me, and
I shook like a leaf, as a dreadful thought took shape in my mind.