“As for this John Clive,” he muttered presently, rousing himself. “I suppose that must be a coincidence, but it's queer, and queer the father should have died—like that.”
He broke off, shuddering slightly, as though at thoughts too awful to be endured, and pushing open the gate, he walked slowly up the gravel path towards the house, round which he began to walk, going very slowly and cautiously and often pausing as if he wished to make as close examination of the place as the darkness would permit.
More by habit than because he thought there was any need of it, he moved always with that extreme and wonderful dexterity of quietness he could assume at will, and as he turned the corner of the building and came behind it, his quick ear, trained by many an emergency to pick out the least unusual sound, caught a faint, continued scratching noise, so faint and low it might well have passed unnoticed.
All at once he understood and realized that some one quite close at hand was stealthily cutting out the glass from one of the panes of a ground-floor window.
CHAPTER IV. A WOMAN WEEPS
Cautiously he glided nearer, moving as noiselessly as any shadow, seeming indeed but one shadow the more in the heavy surrounding darkness.
The persistent scratching noise continued, and Dunn was now so close he could have put out his hand and touched the shoulder of the man who was causing it and who still, intent and busy, had not the least idea of the other's proximity.
A faint smile touched Dunn's lips. The situation seemed not to be without a grim humour, for if one-half of what he suspected were true, one might as sensibly and safely attempt to break into the condemned cell at Pentonville Gaol as into this quiet house.
But then, was it perhaps possible that this fellow, working away so unconcernedly, within arm's-length of him, was in reality one of them, seeking to obtain admittance in this way for some reason of his own, some private treachery, it might be, or some dispute? To Dunn that did not seem likely. More probably the fellow was merely an ordinary burglar—some local practitioner of the housebreaking art, perhaps—whose ill-fortune it was to have hit upon this house to rob without his having the least idea of the nature of the place he was trying to enter.