were fast barred as the
doors of a tomb. And the silence deepened as the moonlight waxed.

There was one little window, high up, that showed no shutter. He looked
at it; measured its distance from the ground and from the nearest of the
great chestnut trees. Then he walked along under the avenue of chestnuts
with head thrown back and eyes fixed on the mystery of their interlacing
branches.

At the fifth tree he stopped; leaped to the lowest bough, missed it;
leaped again, caught it, and drew up his body. Then climbing, creeping,
swinging, while the leaves, agitated by his progress, rustled to the
bending of the boughs, he passed to that tree, to the next--swift,
assured, unhesitating. And so from tree to tree, till he was at the
last tree--and on the bough that stretched to touch the little window
with its leaves.

He swung from this. The bough bent and cracked, and would have broken,
but that at the only possible instant the thief swung forward, felt the
edge of the window with his feet, loosed the bough, sprang, and stood,
flattened against the mouldings, clutching the carved drip-stone with
his hands. He thrust his knee through the window, waiting for the tinkle
of the falling glass to settle into quietness, opened the window, and
crept in. He found himself in a corridor: he could see the long line of
its white windows, and the bars of moonlight falling across the inlaid
wood of its floor.

He took out his thief's lantern--high and slender like a tall
cup--lighted it, and crept softly along the corridor, listening between
his steps till the silence grew to be like a humming in his ears.

And slowly, stealthily, he opened door after door; the rooms were
spacious and empty--his lantern's yellow light flashing into their
corners told him this. Some poor, plain furniture he discerned, a
curtain or a bench here and there, but not what he sought. So large was
the house, that presently it seemed to the thief that for many hours he
had been wandering along its galleries, creeping down its wide stairs,
opening the grudging doors of the dark, empty rooms, whose silence spoke
ever more insistently in his ears.

"But it is as he told me," he said inwardly: "no living soul in all the
place. The old man--a servant of this great house--he told me; he knew,
and I have found all even as he said."

Then the thief turned away from the arched emptiness of the grand
staircase, and in a far corner of the hall he found himself spea