"Nobody else," Jack replied. "Isn't it wonderful? Anybody would think he was a great artist absolutely lost to all sense of his surroundings. Still, as you say, it is our duty to let him know what is going on, even if we have to break in the door."
Rigby grinned responsively. Secure in his disguise, he was not afraid of being taken for anything else but a street loafer eager to earn a more or less honest shilling. He tried the door and found it locked; he ran back a pace or two and hurled himself with full force against the oak door. Crack went the door on its hinges, the woodwork gave inwardly, and the room was disclosed to view.
The music had not stopped or faltered for an instant, the whole apartment was flooded with a delicate melody. Jack stood there puzzled and bewildered, and with a feeling that he would wake presently and find that it was all a dream.
"Absolutely stupendous!" he cried; "music fit food for the gods, and not a sign of the player!"
For the room was absolutely empty!
[CHAPTER XIX.]
A BROKEN MELODY.
There they stood in the empty room, neither speaking, and gazing about them as if they expected some solution of the strange mystery to fall upon them. The wildest part of the whole thing was that though the music continued in the same sweet, harmonious way, there was not the slightest suggestion or indication of where it came from. It could not possibly have been a phonograph or a gramophone or anything of that kind, as the instrument in that case would have been in sight. And yet the whole room was flooded with that beautiful melody as if an invisible choir had been there making the music of the gods.
"I declare it makes me feel quite queer," Rigby said; "but of course there must be some practical explanation of it. Can you suggest any common sense solution?"
"No, but I am quite sure that Anstruther could," Jack replied. "This has nothing to do with the other world. What's that?"