"It was you! You have walked again! See, here is your candle half burned and still warm, and there are drops of wax upon the floor before the picture. Would you ruin us all that you will not have a guard at night?"
Another murmur, and then the voice of Wolvert, smooth and silky, dominated the others.
"It is all right, Marcia. The portrait is back in its place. You must have closed it before you came upstairs, although it is a mystery to me how you reached your room so quickly. I thought somnambulists moved step by step, but you must have fairly flown. I wonder that the alarm did not awaken you, or our lights and yells, but at least no harm has been done."
His last words conveyed a swift suggestion to the girl's mind, and lest she court suspicion by effacing herself, she sprang from bed, and switching on the lights, opened the door.
"What is the matter? Is anyone ill?" She blinked realistically in the sudden glare and her clear, young voice rang out above the others. Madame Cimmino turned like an avenging fury.
"What is it to you?" she screamed. "Go back to your bed and do not meddle! Sancta Maria! Must we find you always at our heels? This comes of admitting an outsider—"
"Speranza, you are beside yourself!" Mrs. Atterbury's voice, poised and dominant once more, broke in sternly. "You have been startled, I know, but that does not excuse your lack of self-control. Everything is quite all right, Betty. Welch happened to touch one of the wires of the burglar alarm and aroused the house. Don't allow it to disturb you, it was just a stupid mistake."
Betty closed her door with a little sigh of relief for her narrow escape, and the confusion of voices in the hall gradually subsided until silence reigned once more. Mrs. Atterbury's burned candle and the wax which had fallen from her own combined to form unassailable if falsely corroborative evidence that her employer alone had been in the music room, and Betty breathed a prayer of thankfulness for the fortuitous chance which had saved her from exposure. The portrait of Beethoven was before her eyes when she at length fell asleep, and in the darkness, as her heavy lids closed, she seemed again to see it swing from its massive frame and in the aperture loomed that which she had scarcely noted in the excitement of the moment; the dull sheen of a sheet of steel, with the combination knob in the center. The safe was there as she had suspected, but would chance, which had served her so well that night, enable her to glimpse what lay within it?
Her first waking thought reverted to it in the morning, but when she descended at the sound of the breakfast gong she sensed a new tension in the atmosphere which put her instantly on her guard.
Mrs. Atterbury was in her accustomed place at the head of the table but she avoided the girl's eyes as she bade her good morning and her level tones were oddly shaken. Welch turned from the sideboard at the sound of her voice and the silver dish-cover which he held clattered to the floor. His face was pasty and gray and he stared at Betty in a sort of horror until a sharp word from his hostess sent him hastily about his duties.