The bolt slide was set rather tight in its stop. This tightness was due to the shower-room door having shifted a bit off its true setting under the four battering-ram smacks which had splintered its panel, and Mrs. Millay’s fingers were finding a thoroughly exasperating amount of difficulty over loosening the bolt.
For a while it had seemed as though it simply would not budge, but just now it had given a little and with a torturing reluctance it was beginning to slide. Her breathing once more was intensifying into that harsh, sick, râle sound, while her desperate exertions with the bolt were filming a gummy coat of sweat across her skin.
It was free.
She opened the door. And at last, within a step or two of her knife, most suitably vulnerable, through the betrayal of coma, to a studied
