"Do you recall that while I was examining the desk I stopped to listen?"
"Yes, and told me to put out the lights."
"The sound that I heard came from the room in the rear of the library; when I asked you to switch off the lights it was because I wanted to open the door between the two rooms without the knowledge of the person who may have made the sound."
"You saw no one?"
"No. But I heard something like quick footsteps going down the hall, and then the soft closing of the street door."
"By George, I heard that, too," said Fuller, remembering.
"Some one had been in the room in the rear of the library," said Ashton-Kirk. "What I heard in the first place was perhaps some sort of sound made as he was stealing away. Drevenoff was the last person I had seen in the hall, and naturally he was suggested to me as the cause of the sounds."
"But you had told him to go to the police station."
"Told him—yes. But if you will remember, he had not yet gone when we entered the library. He said that the police station was a matter of four blocks; if he had gone at once he would have reached there long before I heard the sound in the back room. I at once went to the 'phone, which I had noticed in the back hall, and called up the station in question. No; he had not yet reached there. Would the sergeant kindly make a private note of when he did? The sergeant would."
"And did he?"