Awed, P. Sybarite grasped his revolver and strode to the door with much dramatic manner, but paused with a hand on the knob to look over his shoulder.
The woman was there, not a foot distant, her countenance a mask of suspicious determination.
"Go on!" she commanded in menacing accents.
He pulled the door open, flung out into the hallway, paused again at the mouth of the back pit of the stairway.
Behind him the woman snapped a switch; an electric bulb glared out of the darkness. And P. Sybarite, peering down, started back with a gasp of amazement that was echoed in his ear.
On the stairs, halfway down, a man was crouching in a posture of frozen consternation: a small electric pocket-lamp burning brilliantly in one hand, the other, lifted, grasping a weapon of some curious sort, in the eyes of P. Sybarite more than anything else like, a small black cannon: a hatless man in evening clothes, his face half blotted out by a black mask that, enhancing the brightness of startled eyes gleaming through its peepholes, left uncovered only his angular muscular jaw and ugly, twisted mouth.
For a full minute (it seemed) not one of the three so much as drew breath; while through the haze of dumfounderment in P. Sybarite's brain there loomed the fact that once again Kismet had played into his hands to save his face in thus lending material body and substance to the burglar of his desperate invention.
And then, as if from a heart of agony, the woman at his side breathed a broken and tortured cry:
"You dog! So it's come to murder, has it?"
As if electrified by that ejaculation, P. Sybarite whipped up Penfield's revolver and levelled it at the man on the stairs.