His heart beat faster while he strained his ears. For a long moment he heard nothing, and he was just about to tell himself with vast relief that he had imagined the previous sounds when they came again. Resisting the impulse to awaken Tim, he crept out of the big bed and made his way noiselessly to the door. From below, seemingly from the dining-room, came the tinkle of metal and the creak of a board. ‘_Robbers!_’ thought Pud. His first impulse was to return and awaken Tim and Harmon, his second to make certain that he was right. He would look an awful fool if he waked the others up and then discovered that the suspicious sounds had been made by――well, some perfectly innocent thing such as a cat! After a moment of hesitation he emerged into the hall. The stairway was a long distance, but he reached the railing finally and, guiding himself by it, crept on until he could crane his head over it and bring the dining-room door into his field of vision. The stairs and the hall below were dark, but beyond the open door of the dining-room there was light. It was a very weak light and Pud guessed that it came from a small electric torch. While he gazed it vanished entirely. Then it reappeared, stronger this time, as though it was focused closer to the door into the hall. There was a shuffling, dragging sound and the faint clink of metal once more, as though muffled by cloth. Then, with startling effect on the watcher, the light fell on the edge of the doorway and traveled past into the hall, illumining it with faint, white radiance. Pud retreated swiftly to the room. There, a hand on the doorknob, he thought hard. What was going on downstairs was quite plain to him. Some one was stealing Aunt Sabrina’s silver! Aunt Sabrina thought a good deal of her silver, for much of it had belonged in her family for several generations, and she would, Pud knew, be terribly grieved if she lost it. Therefore she mustn’t lose it. Some way he must circumvent the robber. The telephone, an old-style wall affair, was in the lower hall and not two yards from the dining-room. Plainly that offered no solution. Pud considered a sortie in force, but he remembered that burglars carried weapons. Even if they managed to frighten the burglar, he would probably take his booty with him. Further planning was interrupted by the soft sound of feet on the stairs, and Pud retired inside his door and watched breathlessly through a half-inch crack.