“Have you been able to see the cellars?” “No, everything is locked off.” “Do you think the rear staircase goes all the way down?” “I haven’t the slightest idea.” “You are in the house. Have you any suggestions as to the best method of getting into the house? Is Reed on guard all night?” “I think he is.” “It may interest you to know,” he said finally, “that I sent a reliable man to break in there last night quietly, and that he—couldn’t do it. He got a leg through a cellar window, and came near not getting it out again. Reed was just inside in the dark.” He laughed a little, but I guessed that the thing galled him. “I do not believe that he would have found anything if he had succeeded in getting in. There has been no crime, Mr. Patton, I am sure of that. But there is a menace of some sort in the house.” “Then why does Mrs. Reed stay and keep the children if there is danger?” “I believe she is afraid to leave him. There are times when I think that he is desperate.” “Does he ever leave the house?” “I think not, unless——” “Yes?” “Unless he is the basement ghost of the other houses.” He stopped in his slow walk and considered it. “It’s possible. In that case I could have him waylaid tonight in the gardens and left there, tied. It would be a hold-up, you understand. The police have no excuse for coming in yet. Or, if we found him breaking into one of the other houses we could get him there. He’d be released, of course, but it would give us time. I want to clean the thing up. I’m not easy while you are in that house.” We agreed that I was to wait inside one of my windows that night, and that on a given signal I should go down and open the front door. The whole thing, of course, was contingent on Mr. Reed leaving the house some time that night. It was only a chance. “The house is barred like a fortress,” Mr. Patton said as he left me. “The window with the grating is hopeless. We tried it last night.” VI I find that my notes of that last night in the house on Beauregard Square are rather confused, some written at the time, some just before. For instance, on the edge of a newspaper clipping I find this: “Evidently this is the item. R—— went pale on reading it. Did not allow wife to see paper.” The clipping is an account of the sudden death of an elderly gentleman named Smythe, one of the Beauregard families. The next clipping is less hasty and is on a yellow symptom record. It has been much folded—I believe I tucked it in my apron belt: “If the rear staircase is bolted everywhere from the inside, how did the person who locked it, either Mr. or Mrs. Reed, get back into the body of the house again? Or did Mademoiselle do it? In that case she is no longer a prisoner and the bolts outside her room are not fastened.