He set to work without further hesitation.
In the next room to the one in which he was occupied sat a lady, who was evidently waiting for some one. She heard a noise in the adjoining apartment.
“Dear me, how late it is!” she murmured. “I ought to have been in bed hours ago. Ethel, is that you?”
Ethel, the ladies’ maid, did not answer, and the faint rustle in the back-room, which had called forth the lady’s question, ceased the instant she spoke aloud.
The lady was not wanting in courage—she was not nervous—far from it, yet her watch seemed to tick with extraordinary vigour, and her heart to beat harder than common while she listened.
The door of communication between the two rooms was closed. Another door in the smaller apartment opened to the passage; but this, she remembered, was invariably locked on the inside.
It couldn’t be Ethel, therefore, who disturbed her mistress’s reflections, unless that faithful handmaiden had come down the chimney or in at the window.
It could not be her husband, for he was far away in the country on a visit to some of his relatives. Still, it was just possible he might have come back; but even assuming he had, it was not at all likely that he would be groping about in the adjoining room.
The house was very silent—so silent that in the distant corridors were distinctly audible those faint and ghostly footfalls which traverse all large houses after midnight.
A small hand-lamp was burning on the lady’s toilette table, but it served rather to show how dismal were the shadowy corners of the large lofty bedroom than to afford light and confidence to its inmate.