Two minutes later she reappeared. She was inspired with the desire to impress David with her skill as a thief, as another woman might be inspired to attract male attention by the display of her beauty. "I just opened a back window and broke the latch," she whispered. "We'll lock these doors when we go out, and they'll think we got in through the window. Now, come on. But hadn't you better take off your shoes? They're pretty heavy."
David sat down upon a chair, and she turned her lantern's bar of light upon his feet, so that he could better manage the laces. When the shoes came off, there were his heels and toes gleaming whitely. In the confusion of strange sensations that had begun to flow in upon him, he had forgotten that his stockings were only tops. He quickly shifted his feet out of the embarrassing rays.
"That's all right," said Kate. "There'll be plenty of new ones to-morrow."
They went up a narrow stairway, then a broad one, stealthily following the guidance of the lantern's white finger, pausing breathless at every three or four steps to reach forth with their ears for any possible stir of life—Kate tense and alert with excitement, David giddied by a choking, throbbing, unshaped emotion. After a dozen of these pauses, when to David the rubadub of his heart seemed to resound through the house, Kate led him across deep rugs and through a broad doorway hung with tapestries.
"The drawing-room," she whispered, and slowly sweeping it with her lantern she revealed to him its gorgeous fittings. Then her lantern sought out a curio cabinet, of glass sides and gilded frame, standing in a corner. "That's what we want in here," she said. At her order David set down the suit-case he had carried, and they tiptoed to the cabinet over rugs worth hundreds of dollars a step.
"You get the good things in there, I'll go upstairs after the old lady's sparklers, and then we'll both go down and get the silver," she whispered, as she unlocked the cabinet with one of her keys. "I'll meet you here in a little while."
A sudden fear of being alone leaped up in David. He clutched Kate's arm and threw the lantern's light into her face. Of the face he saw only a narrow slit between her handkerchief and hat-brim, amid which her eyes gleamed like black diamonds.
"What's the matter?" she asked. "You're trembling."
"It must be—my nerves are gone," he whispered, with an effort.
"Oh, you'll be all right when you've been fed up and done another job or two."