“Absolutely not. I was coming through the window when I heard your voice at the door!” Bailey’s eyes leaped to the window—yes—a ladder was there—the Doctor might be speaking the truth after all. But if so, how and why had Dale disappeared? The Doctor’s admission of his manner of entrance did not make Lizzie any the happier. “In at the window—just like a bat!” she muttered in shaking tones. She would not have stayed in the doorway if she had not been afraid to move anywhere else. “I saw lights up here from outside,” continued the Doctor easily. “And I thought—” Miss Cornelia interrupted him. She had set down her candle and laid the revolver on the top of the clothes hamper and now stood gazing at the mantel-fireplace. “The mantel’s—closed!” she said. The Doctor stared. So the secret of the Hidden Room was a secret no longer. He saw ruin gaping before him—a bottomless abyss. “Damnation!” he cursed impotently under his breath. Bailey turned on him savagely. “Did you shut that mantel?” “No!” “I’ll see whether you shut it or not!” Bailey leaped toward the fireplace. “Dale! Dale!” he called desperately, leaning against the mantel. His fingers groped for the knob that worked the mechanism of the hidden entrance. The Doctor picked up the single lighted candle from the hamper, as if to throw more light on Bailey’s task. Bailey’s fingers found the knob. He turned it. The mantel began to swing out into the room. As it did so the Doctor deliberately snuffed out the light of the candle he held, leaving the room in abrupt and obliterating darkness. CHAPTER SEVENTEEN ANDERSON MAKES AN ARREST “Doctor, why did you put out that candle?” Miss Cornelia’s voice cut the blackness like a knife. “I didn’t—I—” “You did—I saw you do it.” The brief exchange of accusation and denial took but an instant of time, as the mantel swung wide open. The next instant there was a rush of feet across the floor, from the fireplace—the shock of a collision between two bodies—the sound of a heavy fall. “What was that?” queried Bailey dazedly, with a feeling as if some great winged creature had brushed at him and passed. Lizzie answered from the doorway. “Oh, oh!” she groaned in stricken accents. “Somebody knocked me down and tramped on me!” “Matches, quick!” commanded Miss Cornelia. “Where’s the candle?” The Doctor was still trying to explain his curious action of a moment before. “Awfully sorry, I assure you—it dropped out of the holder—ah, here it is!” He held it up triumphantly. Bailey struck a match and lighted it. The wavering little flame showed Lizzie prostrate but vocal, in the doorway—and Dale lying on the floor of the Hidden Room, her eyes shut, and her face as drained of color as the face of a marble statue. For one horrible instant Bailey thought she must be dead. He rushed to her wildly and picked her up in his arms. No—still breathing—thank God! He carried her tenderly to the only chair in the room. “Doctor!”