trange touches on
a door disused for years, I recalled the tremor with which I rounded the
top of the stair that night of long ago and the mingled fear and awe
with which I recognized, not only such a mint of money as I had never
seen out of the bank before, but the greedy and devouring passion with
which he pushed the glittering coins about and handled the bank-notes
and gloated over the pile it all made when drawn together by his hooked
fingers, till the sound, perhaps, of my breathing in the dark hall
startled him with a thought of discovery, and his two hands came
together over that pile with a gesture more eloquent even than the look
with which he seemed to penetrate the very shadows in the silent space
wherein I stood. It was a vision short, but inexpressibly vivid, of the
miser incarnate, and having seen it and escaped detection, as was my
undeserved luck that night, I needed never to ask again why he had been
willing to accept risks from which most men shrink from fear if not from
conscience. He loved money, not as the spender loves it, openly and with
luxurious instincts, but secretly and with a knavish dread of discovery
which spoke of treasure ill acquired.

And now he was seeking to add to his gains, and I stood on the outside
of his house listening to sounds I did not understand, instead of
attempting to draw him to the office-door by ringing the bell he never
used to disconnect till nine.

"Do you know that I don't quite like the noises which are being made up
there?" came in a sudden whisper to my ear. "Supposing it was the child
trying to get out! She does not know there is no stoop; she seemed
sleeping or half-dead when he carried her in, and if by any chance she
has got hold of the key and the door should open--"

"Hush!" I cried, starting forward in horror of the thought he had
suggested. "It _is_ opening. I see a thread of light. What does it mean,
Jupp? The child? No; there is more than a child's strength in that push.
Hist!" Here I drew him flat against the wall. The door above had swung
back and some one was stamping on the threshold over our heads in what
appeared to be an outburst of ungovernable fury.

That it was the doctor I could not doubt. But why this anger; why this
mad gasping after breath and the half-growl, half-cry, with which he
faced the night and the quiet of a street which to his glance, passing
as it did over our heads, must have appeared altogether deserted? We
were consulti