Here on the ground floor, in the hall of the wing, a bedroom door began to open very slowly, as though left unlatched and stirred mysteriously by the night breeze. Wider and wider it swung, then ceased to move. Into the dimly lighted hall a man’s head and shoulders cautiously protruded. His body appeared. After a moment of hesitation he began to steal along the hall, keeping close to the wall to avoid creaking boards. The curtains that hid the darkened billiard-room parted and closed behind him with a faint rustle. Minutes of cautious advance brought him to the open billiard-room door and the lateral hall beyond, now faintly discernible in the light that escaped through the open door from the library.
He edged along the hall, reached the spot from which he could see the side face and one shoulder of the drowsy policeman, passed on without a sound. Suddenly he began to retrace his steps with even greater care than before.
At the same moment another bedroom door opened in the lower wing hall and another figure crept along the wall toward the billiard-room. This second figure gained the curtains just as the first reëntered the billiard-room from the other hall. There was a tense, motionless silence, a sharply whispered word, then a murmured colloquy, too low to be heard by the policeman nodding in the warmth of the library fire.
A moment later the first figure slipped again into the hall back of the library, won past the peril of the library door and reached the swing door into the servants’ hall. Inch by inch the door was pressed back. The man stole through. Inch by cautious inch the door swung closed again.
For another half hour the house stood mantled in a silence as profound as that which now enshrouded its recent owner in the library. Then the same swing door began to move once more. A figure, slimmer and more delicate than the other, stole silently through into the hall and paused there, listening and staring intently toward the library door.
From the direction of the butler’s pantry behind it came a faint, dull thud. The figure in the lateral hall started violently, then in sudden panic bolted for the door into the billiard-room, only to shrink back with a gasp of dismay as the second figure from the wing blocked that doorway.
In the library, the policeman leapt to his feet and raced for the door at the end. The swing door from the servants’ hall was thrust violently open. Then someone pressed the switch near it and the lateral hall was flooded with light.
The rear door of the library framed the startled policeman. In the billiard-room doorway stood Bernard, blinking in the glare and simply attired in voluminous black and white pyjamas. Just inside the swing door at the end of the hall stood Landis in a similar suit of pyjamas much too large for him, his hand still on the switch. After a glance at each other the men turned their attention upon the fourth person strategically trapped between the three of them. Anita stood there, shrinking a little and inarticulate with panic amazement, her slender figure clad in a gossamer nightgown and a feather-trimmed negligee, her feet in satin slippers.
Although two of the men were prepared and she was not, Anita was the first to speak. She crossed her hands on her slim shoulders and turned a sidelong glance on Landis.
“Oh, please put out the light, won’t you?”