lessly, when all slept and her going and coming would not
be observed. She left her home at a moonless midnight, took candle and
matches, dressed in her stoutest clothes and walked over North Hill
towards Bridport. But at the eastern shoulder of the downs she descended
through a field and struck the road again just at the fork where Raymond
had perished.

Then she struck into the West Haven way and soon slipped under the black
mass of the old store. The night was cloudy and still. No wind blew and
the sigh of the sea beneath the shelving beaches close at hand, had sunk
to a murmur. West Haven lay lost in darkness. The old store had been
searched, as many other empty buildings, for the fugitive; but he was
not specially associated with this place, save in the mind of Estelle.
The police had hunted it carefully, no more, and she guessed that his
eerie under the roof, only reached by a somewhat perilous climb through
a broken window, would not be discovered.

She remembered also that there were some students of Raymond's murder
who did not associate Abel with it. Such held that only accident and
coincidence had made him run away on the night of Ironsyde's end. They
argued that in these cases the obvious always proved erroneous, and the
theory most transparently rational seldom led the way to the truth.

But she had never doubted about that. It seemed already a commonplace of
knowledge, a lifetime old, that Abel had destroyed his father, and that
he must be insane to have ruined his own life in this manner.

She ascended cautiously through the darkness, reached a gap--once a
window--from which her ascent must be made, and listened for a few
moments to hear if anything stirred above her.

It seemed as though the old store was full of noises, for the fingers of
decay never cease from picking and, in the silence of night, one can
best hear their stealthy activities. Little falls of fragments sounded
loudly, even echoed, in this great silence. There was almost a
perpetual rustle and whisper; and once a thud and skurry, when a rat
displaced a piece of mortar which fell from the rotting plaster. Dark
though the heaven was and black the outer night, it had the quality that
air never loses and she saw the sky as possessed of illumination in
contrast with its setting of the broken window. Within all was blankly
black; from above there came no sound.

She climbed to the window ledge, felt for the nails that Abel had
hammered in