Suddenly--a sound! It broke upon her absorption so abruptly that in an instant every muscle was adjusted for flight, though she paused and looked fearfully over her shoulder. Only an echo, she told her plunging heart--an echo of her own footfalls in the resonant emptiness of the deserted place. She had wandered down a long corridor, from which doors opened only on one side into the big bare dining-room, the chairs all ranged on the tops of the many round tables, standing at equidistant intervals. An echo--doubtless that was all. She upbraided herself to have sustained so sudden and causeless a fright. Her heart was beating like a trip-hammer. It seemed to fill all the building with the wild iteration of its pulsations. As she sought to reassure herself, she remembered that in a cross-hall she had noted the telephone, the wire still intact, as she knew, for the connection of the hotel was with that of the bungalow on a party-line of the exchange at Shaftesville, twenty miles away. If she should be really frightened, she could in one moment call up the house across the ravine. The next instant she was almost palsied with recurrent terror: the footfall, stealthy, shuffling, weighty, sounded again. It was never the echo of her own deft, light step! A distinct, sibilant whisper suddenly hissed with warning throughout the place, and as she turned with the instinct of flight she caught a glimpse in the darkling mirror across the dining-room of a fugitive speeding figure, then another, and still another, all frantically, noiselessly fleeing--why or whom, she could not descry, she did not try to discriminate. Without a word or a sound--her voice had deserted her--she turned precipitately and fled in the opposite direction through the corridor, down a cross-hall, and burst out of a side door upon a porch that was the nearest outlet from the building. This porch was less intended as an exit, however, than an outlook. True, there were steps that led down at one side to the ground, but the descent thence was so steep, so rugged and impracticable, that obviously no scheme of utility had prompted its construction. Jagged outcropping ledges, a chaos of scattered boulders, now and again a precipitous verge showing a vertical section of the denuded strata, all formed a slant so precarious and steep that with the sharp sound of the door, closing on its spring, Bayne looked up from his seat in the swing on the veranda across the ravine in blank amazement to see her there essaying the descent, as if in preference to an exit by the safe and easy method of the winding road at the front of the edifice.