Would it open the haven to temporary safety?
She struggled with it--turning it first to the left and then to the right.
The footsteps were sounding nearer and nearer every minute, the voices were growing louder.
Frantic, she gave the key a final desperate twist, and as a sigh of relief escaped her lips the door swung open.

Slipping through the aperture, she closed it softly after her and, panting from excitement and her exertions, turned and faced the recesses of her hiding-place.
It was black, pitch-black, except for a long ray of light that struggled in between the heavy door and its casing, but as Stella Donovan stood there in the gloom she was aware that she was not the only occupant of the cell.

She crouched back, gripped in the hands of another fear, but the next moment her alarm was lessened somewhat by the sound of a soft, well-modulated voice.
"Who's that ?" it said faintly.
Then followed the repeated scratching of a wet match, a flame of yellow light, which was immediately carried to a short tallow candle, and in the aura of its sickly flame Stella Donovan saw the face of a man with long, unkempt beard and feverish eyes that stared at her as though she were an apparition..