When the lad from the butcher’s came to know what portion I wished to bespeak of the sheep they would be killing, come Friday, I heard Eileen once more going through the story of the footprints, combined with details of the missing domestic. He, in turn, told her how a burglar had been one morning in a house next door to his grandmother’s in Bristol, and how, when they chased him, he jumped right over the garden wall, into the very dish of potatoes his aunt was peeling for his dinner. (The pronouns were confusing, but I don’t think it was for the burglar’s dinner the potatoes were intended.) The farmer’s daughter who came to inquire if I would like a fowl, after hearing the story, offered to lend Eileen a novelette she had just been reading, where there were footprints exactly like these; and in the last chapter it turns out that the footprints were those of—I forget who or what, but it was very enthralling, and Eileen gratefully jumped at the offer of the loan. The old man who came to say that they couldn’t deliver any coals till the weather broke, remarked that he didn’t like the look of it at all, and said he should be quite nervous if he were she, and asked her if she had heard about the old woman who had been found dead in her bed in Yorkshire, died of cold, and fifty golden sovereigns tied up in the middle of her pillow? Eileen had not heard of it. The old man said it was as well to keep your eyes open, as there were funny people in the world, and this seemed to him just such another affair. And much more to the same effect. * * * * * That night I was suddenly awakened by a sound, though at first I could not tell what it was. I lay wide awake, holding my breath: then it came again, a gentle rasp, rasp, as though someone were scraping something with a metal tool. At the same moment I heard Virginia and Ursula stirring in the next room. I stole in to them; they too were listening. And then we realised that the burglar had really come! From the direction of the sound we knew he was scraping away the putty, or something of the sort, from a pane of glass that was let into the scullery door. If he managed to get through that, he could undo the bolt, and would be free of the place.