Furtively, yet with a strange half-fearful pleasure, I made my way in safety to the top of the stairs and down. I knew it was useless to inspect the rooms which had been examined many times by day during the past week. So I would have passed the library entrance without a moment’s check in my rapid movement, had not a streak of light shot forth from beneath the door just as I reached the bottom stair. Someone had lit the chandelier.
I felt shock. I curdled. To investigate is one thing; to run point-blank on revelations in the wrong place is another. I had a panicky impulse to slip upstairs again and lock myself in. But instead I loitered where I stood, staring at the yellow drugget spread from the lintel.
The door was slightly ajar, and I saw a portion of the panelling of the library wall; yet no sound came from within. A pale screen of light, of which the edge drew a line on the opposite side of the corridor, indicated that I might peep into the room through the slit of the door. And though my curiosity had somehow turned sick within me, presently I found myself with my eye at the crack.
My legs seemed to wilt. If it had been Cosgrove himself, burly as life, I could not have had a worse turn. A trim young fellow, clad in dinner clothes and wearing a black cap, was inside, and he was a stranger!
He had been standing beyond the table, apparently in thought, his head three-quarters from me, so that I caught only the remote profile of his smooth face, and a narrow slice of his white shirt-front. But now he moved across the room to a bookcase just within my triangle of vision, drew open its glass doors, and commenced looking for some volume. He stood in full view with his back toward me, turning his head from side to side in a survey of the upper shelves. I could see then that though slight of stature, he was, for his height, no mere skeleton, but of fairly solid build, being even a bit broader across the hips than at the shoulders.
A minute later he was beneath the light, his chosen volume lay open before him. I recognized it instantly as the Book of Sylvan Armitage. With his face cast into shadow by the peak of his cap, he leaned across the table with one hand flat on the red velvet, while the other ran through the pages. I could tell that the outspread hand was delicate and tapering, an “artistic” hand; but what I wanted to see plainly was that clean-shaved face.
Of a sudden he picked the book up from the table, pushed himself erect from his leaning position, walked toward the armoury door and beyond my range of vision. There was a click, and the chandelier faded out; a moment later I heard a tiny jingling sound, as of curtain rings disturbed. The young man was restoring the portières to their original places. Then—nothing.
The debonair manner I discerned in this youth even during observation so brief and cramped, the easy, natural way in which his dapper feet carried him across the floor, as if the place belonged to him—all so much at variance with the stealthy habits of a lawless intruder—rather increased the numb, foreboding ill-ease I felt.
At last I ventured into the library, and found it, as I expected, in moon-bathed vacancy. The armoury and the Hall of the Moth were also empty save for their furnishings. I stood in the midst of the Hall, wondering where the young chap had betaken himself, whether out of doors, which seemed unlikely, whether into some crypt or cove in the massive walls, which seemed unlikely, too, or into thin air, which, in spite of the compulsion of ancient sorceries, seemed less likely than either. Anyhow, he was gone, and it remained for me to consider what course to take.
No need to retail my devious thoughts. In the end I saw no good in rousing the house, particularly since I must reveal my secret projects. I went on as before, with caution redoubled.