The girl tiptoed around a high-backed chair, groped her way to the general's desk, and fumbled there. Her hand fell upon the double tubes of the binoculars. She picked them up, parted the curtains, and stepped through the opened glass doors to the balcony. Not a sound anywhere but the faint cluck and cackle of cargo hoists down in the harbor. Jane put the glasses to her eyes, and began to sweep the light-pointed vista below the cliff. Scores of pin-prick beams of radiance marked the fleet where it choked the roadstead--red and white beetles' eyes in the dark. She swung the glasses nearer shore. Ah, there lay the _Saxonia_, with her three rows of glowing portholes near the water; the binoculars even picked out the double column of smoke from her stacks. Three brief hours and that mass of shadow would be moving--moving---- A noise, very slight, came from the library behind the opened doors. The marine glasses remained poised in the girl's hands while she listened. Again the noise--a faint metallic click. She hardly breathed. Turning ever so slowly, she put one hand between the curtains and parted them so that she could look through into the cavernous gloom behind her. A light moved there--a clear round eye of light. Behind it was the faintest suggestion of a figure at the double doors--just a blur of white, it was; but it moved stealthily, swiftly. She heard a key turn in a lock. Then swiftly the eye of light traveled across the library to the door leading to General Crandall's room. There it paused to cut the handle of the door and keyhole beneath out of darkness. A brown hand slipped into the clear shaft of whiteness, put a key into the keyhole, and softly turned it. The same was done for the locks of Lady Crandall's door, on the opposite side of the library, and for the one Jane had just closed behind her--her own door. Than the circle of light, seeming to have an intelligence all its own, approached the desk, flew swiftly to a drawer and there paused. Once more the brown hand plunged into the bore of light; the drawer was carefully opened, and a steel-blue revolver reflected bright sparks from its barrel as it was withdrawn. Jane, hardly daring to breathe, and with the heavy curtains gathered close so that only a space for her eyes was left open, watched the orb of light, fascinated. It groped under the desk, found a nest of slender wires. There was a "Snick--snick!" and the severed ends of the wires dropped to the floor. The burnished dial of the wall safe, set near the double doors, was the next object to come under the restless searching eye. While light poured steadily upon the circular bit of steel, delicate fingers played with it, twisting and turning this way and that. Then they were laid upon the handle of the safe door, and it swung noiselessly back. A tapering brown hand, white-sleeved, fumbled in a small drawer, withdrew a packet of papers and selected one. Jane stepped boldly into the room.