"Not now," said Tchigorsky, "but this audacity passes all bounds. That woman had planned to strike a blow at the very moment when she was enjoying the hospitality of this roof. The boldness of it would have averted all suspicion from her. One of the family mysteriously disappears and is never heard of again. In the morning not one lock or bolt or bar is disturbed. And yet the member of the family is gone. England would have been startled by the news to-morrow." "You heard all this?" Geoffrey cried. "Yes," Tchigorsky said quietly. "That disguise I showed you was useful to me. It is going to be more useful still." "But the danger! It must be averted," Geoffrey whispered. Already Tchigorsky was leaving the room. The lamp had been extinguished, after taking care to place a box of matches close beside it. In the darkness Geoffrey waited, tingling to his finger tips with suppressed excitement. Meanwhile, Tchigorsky felt his way along in the darkness. He was counting his steps carefully. He reached a certain spot and then stopped. Ralph strolled down the back staircase, and thence down a flagged passage into the hall, where he climbed the stairs. Light and darkness, it was all the same to him. There was nobody in the house who could find his way about as well as he. Then he waited for the best part of half an hour. He could hear queer sounds coming from one of the bedrooms, a half cry in light feminine tones, a smothered protest and then the suggestion of a struggle. Yet Ralph never moved toward it; under cover of the darkness he smiled. Then he heard a door creak and open; he heard footsteps coming along in his direction. The footsteps were stealthy, yet halting; there was the suggestion of the swish of silken drapery. On and on that mysterious figure came until it walked plump into Ralph's arms. There was a faint cry--a cry strangled in its birth. "Mrs. May," Ralph said quietly, "I am afraid I startled you." The woman was gasping for breath, iron-nerved as she was. She stammered out some halting, stumbling explanation. She was suffering from nervous headache, she was subject to that kind of thing, and there was a remedy she always carried in her jacket pocket. And the jacket was in the hall. "Go back to your room," said Ralph. "I will fetch it for you." "There is no occasion," the woman replied. "The shock of meeting you has cured me. But what are you doing?" "Sleeping on the stairs," Ralph said in his dullest, most mechanical way. "Sleep--sleeping on the stairs! Why?" "I frequently do it. I suffer from insomnia. The accident that deprived me of my sight injured my reason. This is one of my lucid intervals. For years I slept in the open air; the atmosphere of a bedroom stifles me. So I am here." "And here you are going to remain all night?" "Yes. I presume you have no objection."