ut that alert
face with its closed eyes--as there is about a house with its blinds drawn
to hide evil enterprises.

So she sat for interminable minutes, and it seemed to Sylvia that she was
not surprised when she heard the sound of tapping at the back door.

She was not surprised, yet a feeling of engulfing horror came over her at
the sound.

Her father opened his eyes now; and it seemed really that he had been
resting. "The boy from the drug-store," he said. "They were to send me
some medicine."

He seemed to be gathering his energies to get up and admit the boy from
the drug-store, but Sylvia sprang to her feet and placed a restraining
hand on his shoulder. "Let me go," she said.

There was an expression of pity and concern for her father in her eyes
when she got to the door and laid her hand on the latch. She was too
absent-minded to observe at first that the bolt had been moved into its
place, and that the door was locked. Her hand had become strange to the
mechanism before her, and she was a little awkward in getting the bolt out
of the way. But the expression of pity and concern was still in her eyes
when she finally pulled the door toward her.

And then she seemed to have known all the time that it was Fectnor who
stood there.

CHAPTER XIII

He slipped past her into the room, and when she uttered a forlorn cry of
defeat and shrank back he gripped her by the wrist. Holding her so, he
turned where he stood and locked the door again. Then he crossed the room,
and closed and bolted that other door which opened into the room where
Sylvia's father sat.

Then he released her and stood his ground stolidly while she shrank away
from him, regarding him with incredulous questioning, with black terror.
She got the impression that he believed himself to have achieved a
victory; that there was no further occasion for him to feel anxious or
wary. It was as if the disagreeable beginning to a profitable enterprise
had been gotten over with. And that look of callous complacence was
scarcely more terrifying than his silence, for as yet he had not uttered a
word.

And yet Sylvia could not regard herself as being really helpless. That
door into her father's room: while it held, her father could not come to
her, but she could go to her father. She had only to wait until Fectnor
was off his guard, and touch the bolt and make her escape. Yet she
perceived now, that for all Fectnor's seeming complacence, he remained