I did not take the time to look more closely over this odd assortment of valuables, for it now seemed clear that I had stumbled on something as disturbing as it was unexpected. The only explanation of an otherwise inexplicable situation was that a house-breaker was busily operating somewhere behind the gray-stone wall which I faced. The house behind that wall seemed to take on no new color at this discovery. Its inherent sobriety, its very rectangularity of outline, appeared a contradiction of any claim that it might be harboring a figure either picturesque or picaresque. It was no old mansion stained with time, dark with memories and tears. It carried no atmosphere of romance, no suggestion of old and great adventures, of stately ways and noble idlers, of intrigues and unremembered loves and hates, of silence and gloom touched with the deeper eloquence of unrecorded history. It was nothing more than a new and narrow and extremely modern house, in the very heart of a modern New York, simple in line and as obvious in architecture as the warehouses along an old-world water-front, as bare of heart as it was bald of face, a symbol of shrill materialities, of the day of utility. It could no more have been a harbor for romance, I told myself, than the stone curb in front of it could be translated into a mountain-precipice threaded with brigand-paths. Yet I went slowly up those unwelcoming stone steps with the bundle under my arm. The thief at work inside the house, I assumed, had simply tied the heavier part of his loot together and dropped it from a quietly opened window, to be gathered as quickly up, once he had effected his escape to the street. The sudden afterthought that it might have been dropped for a confederate caused me to look carefully eastward and then as carefully westward. But not a sign of life met my gaze. My figure standing puzzled before that unknown door was the only figure in the street. Heaven only knows what prompted me to reach out and try that door. It was, I suppose, little more than the habit of a lifetime, the almost unconscious habit of turning a knob when one finds oneself confronted by a door that is closed. The thing that sent a little thrill of excitement through my body was that the knob turned in my hand, that the door itself stood unlocked. I stooped down and examined this lock as best I could in the uncertain light. I even ran a caressing finger along the edge of the door. There was no evidence that it had been jimmied open, just as there was nothing to show that the lock itself did not stand intact and uninjured. A second test of the knob, however, showed me that the door was unmistakably open.