The blind man pressed and pressed the buttons on his bellboard. Any further alarm, after the firing below, seemed superfluous. But his wing of the house had been built for him proof against sound in the main portion of the building; the house, therefore, was deadened to noise within the wing. Santoine, accustomed to considering the manner in which sounds came to himself, knew how these sounds would come to others. Coming from the open windows of the wing and entering the open windows of the other parts of the house, they would not appear to the household to come from within the house at all; they would appear to come from some part of the grounds or from the beach. Yet some one or more than one from his house must be below or have been there. Santoine pressed all the bells again and then got up. He had heard absolutely no sound outside, as must be made by any one escaping from the room below; but the battle seemed over. One side must have destroyed the other. From the character of the fighting, it was most probable that some one had secretly entered the room--Santoine thought of that one definitely now as the man he was entertaining as Eaton; a servant, or some one else from the house, had surprised him in the room and was shot; other servants, roused by the alarm, rushed in and were shot. Santoine counted that, if his servants had survived, one of them must be coming to tell him what had happened. But there was no noise now nor any movement at all below. His side had been beaten, or both sides had ceased to exist. Those alternatives alone occurred to the blind man; the number of shots fired within the confines of the room below precluded any other explanation. He did not imagine the fact that the battle had been fought in the dark; himself perpetually in the dark, he thought of others always in the light. The blind man stood barefooted on the floor, his hands clasping in one of the bitterest moments of his rebellion against, and defiance of, his helplessness of blindness. Below him--as he believed--his servants had been sacrificing life for him; there in that room he held in trust that which affected the security, the faith, the honor of others; his guarding that trust involved his honor no less. And particularly, now, he knew he was bound, at whatever cost, to act; for he did not doubt now but that his half-prisoned guest, whom Santoine had not sufficiently guarded, was at the bottom of the attack. The blind man believed, therefore, that it was because of his own retention here of Eaton that the attack had been made, his servants had been killed, the private secrets of his associates were in danger. Santoine crossed to the door of the hall and opened it and called. No one answered immediately; he started to call again; then he checked himself and shut the door, and opened that to the top of the stairs descending to his study below.