belonged to his
father. He had left the secret room, therefore.

As he watched, a shadow brushed slowly across one of the drawn shades,
swept the second, and returned at once in the opposite direction. Back
and forth, back and forth, that shadow moved, and as his eye grew
accustomed to watching, he caught quite clearly the curve of the
shoulders and the forward droop of the head.

It was not until then that the first alarm came to Anthony, for he knew
that the footsteps of the big grey man were dogged by fear. He could no
more conceive it than he could imagine noon and midnight in conjunction,
and feeling as guilty as if he had played the part of an eavesdropper he
turned away, snapped off the lights, and slipped into bed.

The pleasant warmth of sleep would not come. In its place the images of
the day filed past him like the dance of figures on a motion picture
screen, and always, like the repeated entrance of the hero, the other
images grew small and dim. He saw again the burly stranger wading
through the crowd in the arena, shaking off the packed mob as the prow
of a stately ship shakes off the water, to either side.

At length he started out of bed and glanced through the window. The
moving shadow still swept across the lighted shades of his father's
room; so he donned bathrobe and slippers and went down the long hall. At
the door he did not stop to knock, for he was too deeply concerned by
this time to pay any heed to convention. He grasped the knob and threw
the door wide open. What happened then was so sudden that he could not
be sure afterward what he had seen. He was certain that the door opened
on a lighted room, yet before he could step in the lights were snapped
out.

He was staring into a deep void of night; and a silence came about him
like a whisper. Out of that silence he thought after a second that he
caught the sound of a hurried breathing, louder and louder, as though
someone were creeping upon him. He glanced over his shoulder in a slight
panic, but down the grey hall on either side there was nothing to be
seen. Once more he looked back into the solemn room, opened his lips to
speak, changed his mind, and closed the door again.

Yet when he looked down again from his own room the lights shone once
more on the shades of his father's windows. Past them brushed the shadow
of the pacing man, up and down, up and down. He turned his eyes away to
the jagged tops of the young trees, to the glimpses of