We went from window to window, and Godfrey examined each of them with a minuteness that astonished me, for I had no idea what he expected to find. But we completed the circuit of the ground floor without his apparently discovering anything out of the way.
"Let's take a look at the basement," he said, and led the way downstairs with a readiness which told me that he had been over the house before.
In the kitchen, we came upon the cook and housemaid sitting close together and talking in frightened whispers. They watched us apprehensively, and I stopped to reassure them, while Godfrey proceeded with his search. Then I heard him calling me.
I found him in a kind of lumber-room, standing before its single small window, his electric torch in his hand.
"Look there," he said, his voice quivering with excitement, and threw a circle of light on the jamb of the window at the spot where the upper and lower sashes met.
"What is it?" I asked, after a moment. "I don't see anything wrong."
"You don't? You don't see that this house was to be entered to-night?
Then what does this mean?"
With his finger-nail, he turned up the end of a small insulated wire.
And then I saw that the wire had been cut.