CHAPTER FIFTEENColonel Primrose stepped quickly across the room and touched the painted doorstop lightly with the tip of his brown and white shoes. I kept my gaze riveted to it, trying not to see the lumpy protruding feet in their house-worn black strap slippers, the bony legs in streaked gunmetal stockings, that ghastly head. It was all so unbearably, hideously grotesque. The gaunt sallow figure in the mousy old-fashioned clothes that hadn’t been in the sun for seven years—and on the floor in its usual place the white-painted iron basket full of gay red and blue and yellow and white iron posies…splotched and splattered with blood.
I stared at it, trying desperately to keep from being sick. It was Colonel Primrose who saved me. He shook my arm, and I came to sharply, out of the dark swirl
