At this moment the bird's notes abruptly ceased, and a voice, unlike
anything she had ever heard in her life, yet human, spoke in response to
a more natural human voice, both issuing from above.
The second voice seemed to be Milburn's; the first voice was something
like it, yet not like anything from the throat of man, and the
superstition she had been rebuking in her servant came with a thrilling
influence upon her entire nature. She was about to fly, but called out
one word as she arrested herself:
"Gentlemen! Gentlemen!"
The loud, unclassifiable voice above immediately answered:
"Gent! Gent-gent-gent-en! t-chee, t-chee! Gents, tss-tss-tss! Ha! ha!
Gentlemen!"
"May I come up?" Vesta cried.
"Come, p-chee! Come chee! come tsee! See me! see me! see me! Come
p-chee! come see! come see me!"
The last accentuation, in spite of the bird's interference, was
sufficiently distinct to amount to an invitation, and with a raising of
her eyelids once dependently to heaven, Vesta went up the stairs.
She put her head into a large, long room, which took up the whole
contents of the second story, and was lighted on three sides by the
small windows she had seen without. It had no carpet or floor-covering
of any kind; the fire was gone out upon the chimney-hearth in the end,
and the atmosphere, a little chill, was melting before the sunshine
which now streamed in at both sides of the fireplace and clearly
revealed every object in the apartment,--some clothes-pegs, a wooden
table with a blue plate, a blue cup and saucer and a saucepan upon it,
and a coarse knife and fork; a large green chest, and a leather hat-box;
an old hair trunk fifty years old, and nearly falling to pieces; black
silhouettes, in little round ebony frames, of a woman and a man hung
over the mantel, and between them a silhouette of a face she had no
difficulty in recognizing to be intended for her own.
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