e him and setting down each foot cautiously. Then
he sat down on the stone floor and thought again, and what he thought
was of the things the old Buddhist had told his father, and that there
was a way out of this place for him, and he should somehow find it,
and, before too long a time had passed, be walking in the street again.

It was while he was thinking in this way that he felt a startling
thing. It seemed almost as if something touched him. It made him
jump, though the touch was so light and soft that it was scarcely a
touch at all, in fact he could not be sure that he had not imagined it.
He stood up and leaned against the wall again. Perhaps the suddenness
of his movement placed him at some angle he had not reached before, or
perhaps his eyes had become more completely accustomed to the darkness,
for, as he turned his head to listen, he made a discovery: above the
door there was a place where the velvet blackness was not so dense.
There was something like a slit in the wall, though, as it did not open
upon daylight but upon the dark passage, it was not light it admitted
so much as a lesser shade of darkness. But even that was better than
nothing, and Marco drew another long breath.

"That is only the beginning. I shall find a way out," he said.

"I SHALL."

He remembered reading a story of a man who, being shut by accident in a
safety vault, passed through such terrors before his release that he
believed he had spent two days and nights in the place when he had been
there only a few hours.

"His thoughts did that. I must remember. I will sit down again and
begin thinking of all the pictures in the cabinet rooms of the Art
History Museum in Vienna. It will take some time, and then there are
the others," he said.

It was a good plan. While he could keep his mind upon the game which
had helped him to pass so many dull hours, he could think of nothing
else, as it required close attention--and perhaps, as the day went on,
his captors would begin to feel that it was not safe to run the risk of
doing a thing as desperate as this would be. They might think better
of it before they left the house at least. In any case, he had learned
enough from Loristan to realize that only harm could come from letting
one's mind run wild.

"A mind is either an engine with broken and flying gear, or a giant
power under control," was the thing they knew.

He had walked in imagination through three of the cabinet rooms