Miss Barry lingered at the dressing-table long enough to ask: “Wouldn’t you rather sleep in mother’s room? That communicates with this, with only a little passage in between. The bed is made up.” “Oh no,” Elsie’s staccato came back. “I don’t mind being up there, and my things are spread out; only it seems so creepy to climb all those stairs.” “Wait a minute.” She sprang up. I breathed freely. My sense of propriety was saved. The voices were receding along the front hall. Once the young ladies had begun to mount the stairs I would slip out by the back hall and get off. Relaxing my hold on the silk hangings I stepped out cautiously. My first thought was for the objects I had heard thrown down with a rattle on the writing-desk. They proved to be a string of small pearls, a diamond pin, and some rings of which I made no inspection before sweeping them all into my pocket. I was ready now to steal away, but, to my vexation, the incorrigible maidens had begun to talk love-affairs again at the foot of the staircase leading up to the third floor. They had also turned on the hall light, so that my chances were diminished for getting away unseen. Knowing, however, that sooner or later they would have to go up the next flight, I stood by the writing-desk and waited. I was not nervous; I was not alarmed. As a matter of fact the success of my undertaking up to the present point, together with the action of food and wine, combined to make me excited and hilarious. I chuckled in advance over the mystification of Miss Regina Barry, who would find on returning to her room that her rings, her necklet, and her gold-mesh purse had melted into the atmosphere. In sheer recklessness I was now guilty of a bit of deviltry before which I would have hesitated had I had time to give it a second thought. On the desk there was a scrap of blank paper and a pen. Stooping, I printed in the neat block letters I had once been accustomed to inscribe below a plan: There are men different from those you have seen hitherto. Wait. This I pinned to the pincushion on the dressing-table, beginning at once to creep toward the door, so as to seize the first opportunity of slipping down the back stairs. But again I was frustrated. “I’m all right now,” I heard Elsie say, reassuringly. “Don’t come up. Go back and go to bed.” Miss Barry spoke as she returned along the hall toward her room: “The cook sleeps in the next room to you, so that if you’re afraid in the night you’ve only to hammer on the wall. But you needn’t be. This house is as safe as a prison.” I had barely time to get into the bay window again and pull the curtains to. Some five minutes followed, during which I heard the opening and shutting of drawers and closets and the swish and frou-frou of skirts. I began to curse my idiocy in fastening that silly bit of writing to the pincushion. My only hope lay in the possibility that she would go to bed and to sleep without seeing it.