ibrating noise that I felt rather than heard, much
like the pulsing beat of fire engines in the city. For one awful moment
I thought the house was on fire, and every drop of blood in my body
gathered around my heart; then I knew. It was the engine of the
automobile, and Halsey had come back. Hope sprang up afresh. Halsey's
clear head and Gertrude's intuition might do what Liddy's hysteria and
three detectives had failed in.

After a time I thought I had been right. There was certainly something
going on down below; doors were slamming, people were hurrying through
the halls, and certain high notes of excited voices penetrated to me
shrilly. I hoped they were coming closer, but after a time the sounds
died away below, and I was left to the silence and heat, to the weight
of the darkness, to the oppression of walls that seemed to close in on
me and stifle me.

The first warning I had was a stealthy fumbling at the lock of the
mantel-door. With my mouth open to scream, I stopped. Perhaps the
situation had rendered me acute, perhaps it was instinctive. Whatever
it was, I sat without moving, and some one outside, in absolute
stillness, ran his fingers over the carving of the mantel and--found
the panel.

Now the sounds below redoubled: from the clatter and jarring I knew
that several people were running up the stairs, and as the sounds
approached, I could even hear what they said.

"Watch the end staircases!" Jamieson was shouting. "Damnation--there's
no light here!" And then a second later. "All together now.
One--two--three--"

The door into the trunk-room had been locked from the inside. At the
second that it gave, opening against the wall with a crash and
evidently tumbling somebody into the room, the stealthy fingers beyond
the mantel-door gave the knob the proper impetus, and--the door swung
open, and closed again. Only--and Liddy always screams and puts her
fingers in her ears at this point--only now I was not alone in the
chimney room. There was some one else in the darkness, some one who
breathed hard, and who was so close I could have touched him with my
hand.

I was in a paralysis of terror. Outside there were excited voices and
incredulous oaths. The trunks were being jerked around in a frantic
search, the windows were thrown open, only to show a sheer drop of
forty feet. And the man in the room with me leaned against the
mantel-door and listened. His pursuers were plainly baffled: I hear