It was into a private house that T. Burton Potter injected himself by way of the kitchen door under the high stone steps leading to the main entrance above. He had a key to this door.
“Hello!” he whispered to himself. “Things look different. By Jove! Suppose I don’t find Lampton here! He is the only one of the crowd that would know me. Well, I can explain. But what have they changed things for? It is only three weeks since I was here before.”
Cautiously, he went out of the kitchen in which he had first found himself, and up the stairs to the main hall.
At every step he realized that there had been changes since his last visit. The carpet was not the same, and when he got to the hall, where a dim gas jet burned, he saw that the hall rack was one he never had seen before, and that there were pictures on the walls which were strange to him.
He turned into a room which had been used as a sort of sitting room by the assemblage of shady characters who had made this house a sort of private clubhouse when he had known it before, although it passed to outsiders as the home of two wealthy families.
“Why, this room is altogether different,” muttered Potter. “There is a handsome sideboard over there, and I see silver enough to tempt anybody. I’ll bet the gang has moved out, and that somebody else has moved in. Now, what is this all about?”
Puzzled, he went into the front room, which was separated only by portières, and found that it was a luxuriously furnished apartment, with a piano and many pictures on the walls, which he was connoisseur enough to know were valuable.
He went out to the hall in a state of bewilderment and somewhat frightened, too—for he knew he was in a house in which the police might say he had no right to be. Why hadn’t they changed the lock on the lower door? Then he couldn’t have let himself in, and he might have been saved all this.
He would get out as quickly as he could. This was the only safe move for him!
He stole along the hall, intending to make his exit by the door which had admitted him, when, suddenly he perceived his own shadow on the wall.