"I can't tell you what I felt until daylight came--I knew, however, that I was at Joseph Chestermarke's--perhaps at Gabriel's--mercy. I had discovered their secret--Hollis was out of the way--but what were they going to do with me? Oddly enough, though I had always had a secret dislike of Gabriel, and even some sort of fear of him, believing him to be a cruel and implacable man, it was Joseph that I now feared. It was he who had drugged and trapped me without a doubt. Why? Then I remembered something else. I had told Joseph--but not Gabriel--about my temporary custody of Lady Ellersdeane's jewels, and he knew where they were safely deposited at the bank--in a certain small safe in the strong room, of which he had a duplicate key. "I found myself--when the light came--in a small room, or cell, in which was a bed, a table, a chair, a dressing-table, evidently a retreat for Joseph when he was working in his laboratory at night. But I soon saw that it was also a strong room. I could hear nothing--the silence was terrible. And--eventually--so was my hunger. I could rise--I could even pace about a little--but there was no food there--and no water. "I don't know how long it was, nor when it was, that Joseph Chestermarke came. But when he came, he brought his true character with him. I could not have believed that any human being could be so callous, so brutal, so coldly indifferent to another's sufferings. I thought as I listened to him of all I had heard about that ancestor of his who had killed a man in cold blood in the old house at the bank--and I knew that Joseph Chestermarke would kill me with no more compunction, and no less, than he would show in crushing a beetle that crossed his path. "His cruelty came out in his frankness. He told me plainly that he had me in his power. Nobody knew where I was--nobody could get to know. His uncle knew nothing of the Hollis affair--no one knew. No one would be told. His uncle, moreover, believed I had run away with convertible securities and Lady Ellersdeane's jewels--he, Joseph, would take care that he and everybody should continue to think so. And then he told me cynically that he had helped himself to the missing securities and to the jewels as well--the event of Saturday night, he said, had just given him the chance he wanted, and in a few days he would be out of this country and in another, where his great talent as a chemist and an inventor would be valued and put to grand use. But he was not going empty-handed, not he!--he was going with as much as ever he could rake together.