He had not locked his door, and now, across the grayness of the room,
he saw it slowly opening. A hand was closed around the edge of the door--a woman's hand, small
and white and jeweled. Eric sat straight and tense on the edge of his
bed, peering across the room. A woman, young and slender, in a long,
trailing gown, came toward him smiling. It was Suzanne. With a gasp, Eric watched her approach till she stood directly before
him. "Suzanne! You are asleep? Suzanne, shall I call John?" He thought that perhaps he should not waken her; there were things one
must remember about sleep-walkers, but physicians scarcely believed
them. Eric was puzzled, too, by her costume. It was not a night-robe she
wore, but an elaborate, trailing dress upon which embroideries in
silver shone faintly. Her short black curls were bound about three
times with strands of pearly beads, her slim white arms were loaded
with bracelets. The pointed toes of little shoes peeped beneath her
gown, little shoes of creamy leather. An amethyst gleamed on each
shoe. The sight of these amethystine tips affected Eric strangely, much as
though he had looked at something hideously repulsive. He stood up and
put out a hand to touch Suzanne's arm. "Suzanne," he said, gently. "Let me take you to John. Shall I?" Suzanne looked up at him, and her brown eyes, usually so merry, were
deeply slumberous, not with sleep, but with a look of utter abandon. She shook her pearl-bound head slowly, smilingly. "No, not John. I want you, Eric." "Mad! Suzanne must be mad!" was Eric's quick thought, but her caress
was swifter than his thought. Both jewel-laden arms about his neck,
Suzanne kissed him, her red lips pouting warmly upon his. "Suzanne! You don't know what you're doing." He grasped both her hands
in his and with a haste that would have seemed ludicrous to him had he
viewed the scene in a picture-play, he hurried her out of his room and
across the hall. Eric opened her door softly and with no gentle hand shoved Suzanne
inside her room. She seemed like a little animal in his grasp. She
hissed at him; clawed and scratched at his hand. But when he had shut
the door, she did not open it again, and after a moment he went back
to his own room. *       *       *       *       *

His mouth set in a firm line, his heart beating fast, Eric locked his
door with a noiseless turn of the key. It was almost dawn, and the
garden lay like a rare pastel outside his window; but Eric saw none of
it. He scarcely thought, though his lips moved, as if chaotic words
were struggling for utterance. He looked down at his hand, where two long red scratches oozed a
trickle of blood. After he had washed his hand, he lay down on his bed
and covered his eyes with his arm, against the picture of Suzanne. Above all else there stood out the gleaming tips of her little shoes,
as he had glimpsed them through the dim light of his room when she
came toward him. "She wore the Medici boots! The Medici boots! Suzanne must have taken
them from the museum!" Over and over he said it--"The Medici boots! The Medici boots!" Eric rather dreaded breakfast, but when he came down at eight, to the
terrace where a rustic table was set invitingly, he found John and the
lawyer awaiting him. John greeted his brother affectionately. "Morning, old boy! Hope you slept well. Why so solemn? Feeling seedy?" "No, no. I am perfectly all right," Eric replied hastily, relieved
that Suzanne was not present. He added with a scarcely noticeable
hesitation, "Suzanne not coming down?" "No," replied John, easily. "She seemed to want to sleep awhile. Sent
her regrets. She'll see us at lunch." John went on. "I certainly had a nightmare last night. Thought a woman
in a long, shining dress came into my room and tried to stab me. This
morning I found that a glass on my bed-table was overturned and
broken, and, by George, I'd cut my wrist on it." He showed a jagged cut on his wrist. "Take a look, Doctor Eric." Eric looked at the cut, carefully. "Not bad, but you might have bled
to death, had it been a quarter of an inch to the left. If you like,
I'll fix it up a bit for you after breakfast." Eric's voice was calm enough, but his pulse was pounding, his heart
sick. All morning he rode through the countryside adjoining the
Dickerson estate, but he let the mare go as she liked and where she
liked, for his mind was busy with the events of the hour before dawn. He knew that the slash on his brother's wrist was made by steel, not
glass. Yet when the ride was over, he could not bring himself to tell
John of Suzanne's visit. "She must have been sleep-walking, though I can't account for the way
she was decked out. I've always thought Suzanne extremely modest in
her dress, certainly not inclined to load herself with jewelry. And
those boots! John must get them today and destroy them, as he said. Silly, perhaps, but----" His thoughts went on and on, always returning
to the Medici boots, in spite of himself. *       *       *       *       *

Eric came back from his ride at eleven o'clock, with as troubled a
mind as when he began it. He almost feared to see Suzanne at lunch. When he did meet her with John and Mr. Erskine on the cool, shaded
porch where they lunched, he saw there was nothing to fear. The
amorous, clinging woman of the hour before dawn was not there at all. There was only the Suzanne whom Eric knew and loved as a sister. Here, again, was their merry little Suzanne, somewhat spoiled by her
husband, it is true, but a Suzanne sweetly feminine, almost childish
in a crisp, white frock and little, low-heeled sandals. Their talk was
lazily pleasant--of tennis honors and horses, of the prize delphiniums
in the garden, of the tiny maltese kitten which Suzanne had brought up
from the stables late that morning and installed in a pink-bowed
basket on the porch. She showed the kitten to Eric, handling its tiny
paws gently, hushing its plaintive mews with ridiculous pet names. "Perhaps I'm a bigger fool than I know. Perhaps it never happened,
except in a dream," Eric told himself, unhappily. "And yet----"

He looked at the red marks on his hand, marks made by a furious
Suzanne in that hour before the dawn. Too, he remembered the cut on
John's wrist, the cut so near the vein. Eric declined John's invitation to go through the museum with him that
afternoon, but he said with a queer sense of diffidence, "While
you're there, John, you'd better get rid of the Medici boots. Creepy
things to have around, I think." "They'll be destroyed, all right. But Suzanne is just bound to try
them on. I'll get them, though, and do as Uncle said." Eric remained on the terrace, speculating somewhat on just what John
and Suzanne would do, now that the huge fortune of Silas Dickerson was
theirs. Eric was not envious of his brother's good luck, and he was
thankful for his share in old Silas' generosity. At five o'clock he entered the hall, just as Suzanne hurried in from
the kitchen. She spread our her hands, laughingly.