It resisted me heavily;
I bent over it, lifting my candle. Then I uttered an exclamation, stood
petrified, and stared.
In the chair, concealed from us until now by the high carved back
of wood, was something which at first looked like a huddled mass of
garments, but which on closer scrutiny resolved itself into a woman in
a striped dress, an apron, and a pair of heavy shoes. There was a cut
on her cheek, a bruise on her forehead. Locks of graying hair straggled
from beneath her disarranged white cap, and she glared at me from a
lean, sallow face with a pair of terrified eyes.
She must be dead, I thought. No living woman could sit so still and
stare so wildly. The scene in the inn garage rushed back upon me, and
I must say that my blood turned cold. But she was alive, I saw now; she
was certainly breathing. And an instant later I realized why she stayed
so immobile; she was bound hand and foot to the chair she sat in, and
a colored handkerchief, her own doubtless, had been twisted across her
mouth to form a gag.
"I think," I head myself saying, "that we have been maligning
Marie-Jeanne.
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