"Yes. At twelve o'clock, Miss Lorne, Miss Comstock, and I went in to say good-night to him. He was sitting in a deep chair with the boy fast asleep in his arms--sitting and looking all about him with the dumb agony of a trapped mouse. I'll never forget how he clutched the boy to him nor the cry he gave when the door opened to admit us, the sob of relief when he saw it was only us. His cry and his movement awoke the boy, but he dropped off to sleep again before I left, and was breathing healthily and peacefully. The last look I had at the picture as I went out, Mr. Cleek, the dear old chap was holding his pet in his arms and smiling down into his boyish face. So he was still sitting, Miss Comstock tells me, when she came down this morning. 'Look,' he said to her, 'I watched him--I held him--the tenth day is past and the death didn't get him, my bonnie!' Then called her to his side and shook the little fellow to awaken him. It was then only that he discovered the truth. The boy was stone-dead!" CHAPTER XXXIII "There, Mr. Cleek," resumed the Captain, after he could master his emotion. "That is the case--that is the riddle I am praying to Heaven that you may be able to solve. What the mysterious power is, when, where, or how it got into the room and got at the boy, God alone knows. Mr. Harmstead will swear that he never let the little fellow out of his arms for one solitary instant between the time of our leaving him just after midnight, and Miss Comstock's coming in in the morning. He admits, however, that twice during that period he fell asleep, but it was only for a few minutes each time; and long years of being constantly alert for possible marauders--out there in the wilds of Australia--have tended to make his sleep so light that anything heavier than a cat's footfall wakes him on the instant. Yet last night something--man or spirit--came and went, and he neither heard nor saw either sound or shape from midnight until morning. One thing I must tell you, however, which may throw some light upon the movements of the appalling thing. Whereas Mr. Harmstead not only closed, but locked, both of the two windows in the room, and pinned the thick plushette curtains of them together--as Miss Comstock and I saw them pinned when we left the room last night--when those curtains came to be drawn this morning one of the windows was found to be partly open, and there was a smear of something that looked like grease across the sill and the stone coping beyond." "Of course, of course!" commented Cleek enigmatically. "Provided my theory is correct, I should have expected that. A thing that comes and goes through windows must, at some period, leave some mark of its passage. Of course that particular window opened upon a balcony or something of that sort, didn't it?" "No, it is a perfectly unbroken descent from the window sill to the ground. But there's a big tree close by, and the branches of that brush the pane of glass."