It was half-past eleven o'clock.

Madame la Comtesse, answering a reputed call to the bedside of a dying friend, had departed early, and was not to be expected back, she said, until to-morrow noon.

The servants--given permission by the gentleman known in the house as Monsieur Gaston Merode, and who had graciously provided a huge char-a-banc for the purpose--had gone in a body to a fair over in the neighbourhood of Sevres, and darkness and stillness filled the long, broad corridor of the Chateau Larouge.

Of a sudden, however, a mere thread of sound wavered through the silence, and from the direction of Miss Lorne's room a figure in black, with feet muffled in thick, woollen stockings, padded to an angle of the passage, lifted a trap carefully hidden beneath a huge tiger-skin rug, and almost immediately Cleek's head rose up out of the gap.
"Thank God you managed to do it.

I was horribly afraid you would not," said Ailsa in a palpitating whisper.
"You need not have been," he answered.