"How?" "By putting an end to this play-acting." "That sounds like a threat." "It was meant for one." "What right have you to threaten me?" She looked about as she spoke, almost wearily. Then she sank into the chair that stood beside the ravaged writing-desk. It was all diverting enough, but I was beginning to lose patience with her. "I'm tired of all this side-stepping," I told her. An answering look of anger flashed from her eyes. "I object to your presence here," she had the effrontery to exclaim. "You mean, I suppose, that I'm rather interfering with your night's operations?" "Those operations," she answered in a fluttering dignity, "are my own affairs." "Of course they are!" I scoffed. "They _have_ to be! But you should have kept them your own affairs. When you drop a bundle of swag out of a window you shouldn't come so perilously near to knocking a man's hat off." "A bundle of swag?" she echoed, with such a precise imitation of wonder that I could plainly see she was going to be the astutest of liars. "The loot you intended carrying off," I calmly explained. "The stuff you dropped down beside the house-step, to be ready for your getaway." "My what?" "Your escape. And it was rather clever." "I dropped nothing," she protested, with a fine pretense of bewilderment on her face. "Nor let it roll quietly off a front window-ledge?" I suggested. "I was near no window--it would be impossible for me to open a window," she protested. Her words in themselves were a confession. "You seem to know this house pretty well," I remarked. "_I ought to--it's my own_," was her quick retort. "It's your own?" I repeated, amazed at the woman's mendacity. "It _was_ my own," she corrected. I peered quickly about the room. It held three doors, one behind the woman, opening into the bathroom, a second opening into the hallway, and a third to the rear, which plainly opened into a clothes-closet. There had been too much of this useless and foolish argument. "Since your claim to proprietorship is so strong," I said as I crossed to the hall door, and, after locking it, pocketed the key, "there are certain features of it I want you to explain to me." "What do you mean?" she asked, once more on her feet. "I want to know," I said, moving toward the curtained door beside her, "just who or what is in that front room?" The look of terror came back to her white face. She even stood with her back against the door, as though to keep me from opening it, making an instinctive gesture for silence as I stood facing her. "I'm going to find out what is in that room," I proclaimed, unmoved by the agony I saw written on her guilty face. "Oh, believe me," she said, in supplicatory tones, a little above a whisper, "it will do no good. It will only make you sorry you interfered in this." "But you've made it my duty to interfere." "No; no; you're only blundering into something where you can do no good, where you have no right."