Thus for a moment dazed and stunned she remained there, knowing not
which way to turn nor what to do. Then her terror-stricken gaze fell
on the doorway leading from her outer office to the inner one, the one
where Stern had had his laboratory and his consultation-room.

This door now hung, a few worm-eaten planks and splintered bits of
wood, barely supported by the rusty hinges.

Toward it she staggered. About her she drew the sheltering masses of
her hair, like a Godiva of another age; and to her eyes, womanlike,
the hot tears mounted. As she went, she cried in a voice of horror.

"Mr. Stern! Oh--Mr. Stern! Are--are _you_ dead, too? You _can't_
be--it's too frightful!"

She reached the door. The mere touch of her outstretched hand
disintegrated it. Down in a crumbling mass it fell. Thick dust bellied
up in a cloud, through which a single sun-ray that entered the
cobwebbed pane shot a radiant arrow.

Peering, hesitant, fearful of even greater terrors in that other room,
Beatrice peered through this dust-haze. A sick foreboding of evil
possessed her at thought of what she might find there--yet more afraid
was she of what she knew lay behind her.

An instant she stood within the ruined doorway, her left hand resting
on the moldy jam. Then, with a cry, she started forward--a cry in
which terror had given place to joy, despair to hope.

Forgotten now the fact that, save for the shrouding of her messy hair,