had.
Something went wrong with it, I guess."

"Did you take a look at the windows?" I asked.

"Yes, sir; a policeman came to see what was the matter and we went
around and examined the windows, but they were all locked. It made me
feel kind of scary for a while."

"Does the alarm work now?"

"No, sir; the policeman said there must be a short circuit somewhere,
and that he'd notify the people who put it in; but nobody has come
around yet to fix it."

"We'd better take a look at the windows, ourselves," said Godfrey.
"You stay here, Parks. We can find them, all right; and I don't want
you to leave that door unguarded for a single instant."

We went from window to window, and Godfrey examined each of them with
a minuteness that astonished me, for I had no idea what he expected
to find. But we completed the circuit of the ground floor without his
apparently discovering anything out of the way.

"Let's take a look at the basement," he said, and led the way
downstairs with a readiness which told me that he had been over the
house before.

In the kitchen, we came upon the cook and housemaid sitting close
together and talking in frightened whispers. They watched us
apprehensively, and I stopped to reassure them, while Godfrey
proceeded with his search. Then I heard him calling me.

I found him in a kind of lumber-room, standing before its single
small window, his electric torch in his hand.

"Look there," he said, his voice quivering with excitement, and threw
a circle of light on the jamb of the window at the spot where the
upper and lower sashes met.

"What is it?" I asked, after a moment. "I don't see anything wrong."

"You don't? You don't see that this house was to be entered to-night?
Then what does this mean?"

With his finger-nail, he turned up the end of a small insulated wire.
And then I saw that the wire had been cut.

CHAPTER XI

THE BURNING EYES

For an instant, I did not grasp the full significance of that severed
wire. Then I understood.

"Yes," said Godfrey drily, "that romance of mine is looking up again.
Somebody was preparing for a quiet invasion of the house to-night
--somebody, of course, interested in that cabinet."

"He wasn't losing any time," I ventured.

"He knew he hadn't any to lose. When you put those wooden shutters
up, you warned him that you suspected his game. He knew, if the alarm
was on, it would ring when he cut the wire, but he also knew that the
chances we