“I think you are quite right, sir” said Bates. He threw down the revolver he held in his hand and leaned upon the edge of the long table that lay on its side, his gaze still bent on Pickering, who stood with his overcoat buttoned close, his derby hat on the floor beside him, where it had fallen as Bates hauled him into the room.

The sound of a measured step, of some one walking, of a careful foot on a stairway, was quite distinct. I even remarked the slight stumble that I had noticed before.

We were all so intent on those steps in the wall that we were off guard. I heard Bates yell at me, and Larry and Stoddard rushed for Pickering. He had drawn a revolver from his overcoat pocket and thrown it up to fire at me when Stoddard sent the weapon flying through the air.

“Only a moment now, gentlemen,” said Bates, an odd smile on his face. He was looking past me toward the right end of the fireplace. There seemed to be in the air a feeling of something impending. Even Morgan and his men, half-crouching ready for a rush at me, hesitated; and Pickering glanced nervously from one to the other of us. It was the calm before the storm; in a moment we should be at each other’s throats for the final struggle, and yet we waited. In the wall I heard still the sound of steps. They were clear to all of us now. We stood there for what seemed an eternity—I suppose the time was really not more than thirty seconds—inert, waiting, while I felt that something must happen; the silence, the waiting, were intolerable. I grasped my pistol and bent low for a spring at Morgan, with the overturned table and wreckage of the chandelier between me and Pickering; and every man in the room was instantly on the alert.

All but Bates. He remained rigid-that curious smile on his blood-smeared face, his eyes bent toward the end of the great fireplace back of me.

That look on his face held, arrested, numbed me; I followed it. I forgot Morgan; a tacit truce held us all again. I stepped back till my eyes fastened on the broad paneled chimney-breast at the right of the hearth, and it was there now that the sound of footsteps in the wall was heard again; then it ceased utterly, the long panel opened slowly, creaking slightly upon its hinges, then down into the room stepped Marian Devereux. She wore the dark gown in which I had seen her last, and a cloak was drawn over her shoulders.

She laughed as her eyes swept the room.

“Ah, gentlemen,” she said, shaking her head, as she viewed our disorder, “what wretched housekeepers you are!”