“I want to take it downstairs, Mrs. Temple——This way, Mr. Pentecost.” The latter followed him across the great bare hall, to a door under the branching stairway on the left, and through this to a back hall at the further end of which the basement stairway descended. Mrs. Temple stood motionless at the table where they’d left her. Strange as it may seem when you realize the briefness of the time, this decrepit old woman, bent and knotted with rheumatism, her hands tremulous with the palsy of age, had conceived a deep and implacable distrust of the man she had just heard addressed as Mr. Pentecost. She didn’t reason about it or ask herself why—that wasn’t her method. She simply accepted it and was determined to do what she could. Ever since Haworth had built the small room in the basement some weeks before, he’d been working feverishly day and night on what she supposed to be one of his inventions, seeming so desperately bent on completing the thing, and for the last day or two plunged in such dreadful despair, that the poor woman was beside herself with anxiety. She’d often seen him through times of such absorption in his work that he would have starved if she hadn’t kept after him with food, but there’d never been anything so terrible as this and she couldn’t find out what was the matter. And now had come this sinister-looking creature (though to save her life she couldn’t have said what was sinister about him) enveloped, it seemed to her, in an atmosphere of cunning and intrigue so dense that she could feel it, and Mr. Haworth had taken him down into the basement—most likely to that secret room he’d been working in so desperately—where the fellow was undoubtedly arranging some infamous plan or deviltry involving him. Haworth, as soon as the door of the roughly planked room was closed on them, had stripped away the sheet that covered his mechanism from view and had begun to describe to Pentecost what it was intended to do. He was in the midst of this when Pentecost suddenly stopped him with a quick motion of his hand. The lamp with its green shade stood on the top board of a stepladder, throwing a weird light on the two men facing each other in silence. Haworth, recovering from his surprise (for he hadn’t heard anything) started to speak, but Pentecost shook his head emphatically, and after a moment’s pause whispered: “I hear someone!” There was another pause. “You think somebody’s listening?” Haworth asked in a subdued voice. “What I _think_ cuts no figure. This is where we take no chances!” And Pentecost suddenly threw open the door. The light struck on old Mrs. Temple as she was going in through the door of Haworth’s workshop nearly opposite. She’d caught a word or two about some one listening and noted the sudden lowering of their voices just in time to turn back and get into the shop.