king would quickly enough bring the warders down upon her. And
yet it must have been that her imagination exaggerated the slight sounds
that attended her cautious advance; for presently she had proof enough
that they could have been audible to none but herself.

Half-way down the corridor she came unexpectedly to a second staircase;
double the width of the other, it ran down to a broad landing and then
in two short flights to the ground floor of the building. The well of
this stairway disclosed a hall rather large and well-finished, if bare.
Directly in front of the landing, where the short flights branched at
right angles to the main, was a large double door, one side of which
stood slightly ajar. Putting this and that together, Eleanor satisfied
herself that she overlooked the entrance-hall and office of an
out-of-the-way summer hotel, neither large nor in any way pretentious
even in its palmiest days, and now abandoned--or, at best, consecrated
to the uses of caretakers and whoever else might happen to inhabit the
wing whence she had wandered.

Now as she paused for an instant, looking down while turning this
thought over in her mind and considering the effect upon herself and
fortunes of indefinite sequestration in such a spot, she was startled by
a cough from some point invisible to her in the hall below. On the heels
of this, she heard something even more inexplicable: the dull and hollow
clang of a heavy metal door. Footsteps were audible immediately: the
quick, nervous footfalls of somebody coming to the front of the house
from a point behind the staircase.

Startled and curious, the girl drew back a careful step or two until
sheltered by the corridor wall at its junction with the balustrade. Here
she might lurk and peer, see but not be seen, save through unhappy
mischance.

The man came promptly into view. She had foretold his identity, had
known it would be ... he whom she must call father.

He moved briskly to the open door, paused and stood looking out for an
instant, then with his air of furtive alertness, yet apparently sure
that he was unobserved and wholly unsuspicious of the presence of the
girl above him, swung back toward the staircase. For an instant,
terrified by the fear that he meant to ascend, she stood poised on the
verge of flight; but that he had another intention at once became
apparent. Stopping at the foot of the left-hand flight of steps, he laid
hold of the turned knob on top of the