I no longer thought of the woman. All my attention went to the two men struggling and panting about the floor. The fury of the man in the shaggy and bear-like dressing-gown was more than I could understand. The madness of his onslaught seemed incomprehensible. This, I felt, was the way a tigress might fight for her brood, the way a cave-man might battle for his threatened mate. Nor did that fight end until the big blond form towered triumphant above the darker clad figure. Then I looked back at the woman, startled by her stillness through it all. She was leaning forward, white, intent, with parted lips. In her eyes I seemed to see uneasiness and solicitude and desolation, but above them all slowly flowered a newer look, a look of vague exultation as she gazed from the defeated man gasping and choking for breath to the broad back of the shaggy-haired dressing-gown. I had no chance to dwell on the puzzle of this, for the man enveloped in the shaggy-haired garment was calling out to me. "Tie him up," he called. "Take the curtain-cords--but tie him tight!" "Do you know this man?" something in his tone prompted me to ask, as I struggled with the heavy silk curtain-cords. "It's Hobbs." "I know that, but who's Hobbs?" "A servant dismissed a month ago," was the other's answer. "Then possibly you know the woman?" I asked, looking up. "Yes, possibly I know the woman," he repeated, standing before her and staring into her white and desolate face. It took me a moment or two to finish my task of trussing the wrists of the sullen and sodden Hobbs. When I looked up the woman was on her feet, several steps nearer the door. "Watch that woman!" I cried. "She's got a load of your loot on her!" My words seemed merely to puzzle him. There was no answering alarm on his face. "What do you mean?" he inquired. He seemed almost to resent my effort in his behalf. The woman's stare, too, seemed able to throw him into something approaching a comatose state, leaving him pale and helpless, as though her eye had the gift of some hypnotic power. It angered me to think that some mere accidental outward husk of respectability could make things so easy for her. Her very air of false refinement, I felt, would always render her viciousness double-edged in its danger. "Search her!" I cried. "See what she's got under her waist there!" He turned his back on me, deliberately, as though resenting my determination to dog him into an act that was distasteful to him. "What have you there?" he asked her, without advancing any closer. There was utter silence for a moment or two. "Your letters," she at last answered, scarcely above a whisper. "What are they doing there?" he asked. "I wanted them," was all she said. "Why should you want my letters?" was his next question. She did not answer it. The man in the dressing-gown turned and pointed to the inert figure of Hobbs. "What about him? How did _he_ get here?"