“Tell me at once,” I said. “You may ask me for any explanation in the morning, and I will give it Where is the money?” I waited, and a dead silence reigned. I repeated my question once, and twice, and thrice: “Where is the money?” Then I heard a muffled voice say: “Here!” I groped forward in the darkness until my hand encountered hers, and took from her grasp a chamois-leather bag, which was all crisp to the touch above and solid below. “That will do,” I said. “You have forced me to do this. You can raise an alarm if you will; I am willing to defend myself, and I have taken the only step that was left me to save the life of Violet's father.” With that I withdrew, stumbling here and there against the furniture in the thick darkness of the room. The sitting-room beyond seemed light by comparison, and the corridor, with its solitary sickly gleam of gas, was as clear as it would have been in broad daylight. I ran to my own room, and flung the bag upon the table. Then I untied the cord which bound it at the neck, and counted its contents. There were twenty notes of the Bank of England for one thousand pounds each, tied up in one little ladylike bundle with a bit of narrow pink silk ribbon. There were thirty-eight notes of five hundred pounds each, tied in the same delicate and feminine fashion. Then there were notes of one hundred and of fifty, to the value of seven hundred pounds. And at the bottom of the bag was a great loose handful of gold, all in bright sovereigns and half-sovereigns, fresh from the Mint. I estimated this little mass of coined gold at three hundred pounds; but just as I was in the act of counting it, the ring of a bell in violent motion tingled through the midnight silence of the house, and I paused. I heard a door thrown open, and an urgent voice at an incredible pitch shrieked, “Thieves!” “Murder!” Then the bell sounded again and yet again, until I heard it fall with a crash upon the stone floor of the corridor below. The wild voice, once loosed, went on shrieking, “Murder!” “Thieves!” I hurried the money I had stolen back into the bag, tied it as I had found it, and awaited the result with perfect equanimity. In less than half a minute doors were banging all over the house, and hurrying feet charged up-stairs and down-stairs. The voice of alarm never ceased for a moment. I stepped out into the corridor, and faced the manager, who was the first man to arrive upon the field. “Lady Rollinson is alarmed,” I said; “you had better send some of your women to her. I have just robbed her of forty thousand pounds, and the money is in my room.” The man glared at me with an expression of profound astonishment. Words were utterly beyond him, and he could only gasp at me. “Tell Lady Rollinson,” I continued, “that the money is quite safe. I shall surrender it to Miss Rossano, to whom it belongs, but to no other person. Now go!”