Having ascended the stairs, the footsteps were now advancing along the passage. They reached that very door against which the man stood listening. They halted there. Some one rapped lightly.
With a groan the man inside drew back. Even as he did so he found himself whirled irresistibly about and away from the door.
A great hand had descended upon his shoulder from behind. That large hand, he discovered, belonged to a man immensely tall-a huge, looming giant of a man, who had stolen upon him while he had ears only for those footsteps in the passage.
The fellow's only garment was a Turkish robe, flung loosely about his enormous shoulders. His black hair, damp from the bath, stood out like a fierce, shaggy mane above a dark, savage face in which a pair of singularly bright blue eyes blazed angrily upon the intruder. This forceful and sudden apparition in a room which the latter had believed unoccupied, was sufficiently alarming. In the little sharp cry which escaped the intruder's throat, however, there seemed a note of emotion other than terror-different from and more painful than mere terror.
"You-you!" he muttered, and fell silent.
"For the love of-" began the giant. But he, too, seemed suddenly moved past verbal expression. As a somber landscape lights to the flash of sunshine, his heavy face changed and brightened. The black scowl vanished. Shaggy brows went up in a look of intense surprise, and the fiercely set mouth relaxed to a grin of amazed but supremely good-humored delight.
"Why, it is!" he ejaculated at length. "It surely is-Bob Drayton!"
And then, with a great, pleased laugh, he released the other's shoulder and reached for his hand.
The intruder made no movement of response. Instead, he drew away shrinkingly, and with hands behind him stood leaning against the door. When he spoke it was in the tone of quiet despair with which a man might accept an intolerable situation from which escape has become impossible.
"Yes, Trenmore, it's I," he said. Even as the words left his lips there came another loud rapping from outside. Some one tried the handle, and only Drayton's weight against the door kept it closed.