Wearily she went to her dressing table, removed the dress she had worn at dinner, slipped into a flowing-sleeved dressing gown that was charmingly open at the throat, and began to let down her glorious bronze hair which cascaded over her shoulders. Detached as Greenacres was, the house was very still, so still that the many sounds which always fill a country night, floated through the window, magnified by her taut, tortured nerves to crescendo volume. "Something has got to happen. Why can't it happen now and be over with!" she moaned. "The suspense, this awful suspense! I can't stand it--I can't!" Nervously she went to the window, and, pushing aside the curtains, leaned out, staring into the night. The future, her future, was like that--black, impenetrable, void, and she felt that there could never be any dawn--not for her. "My life's been nothing but tragedy," she told herself bitterly. "I thought I might be happy and respectable. There's a curse on me; that's what it is, a curse. I'd be better off dead, but--I don't want to die." Helen, staring off into black space, did not see the skulking form that moved stealthily through the shrubbery, circling uneasily, furtively about the house. The slinking man stared upward at the lighted window, stopped, as she leaned out across the sill, framed in the open space by the light which burned within the room behind her. "It's her!" he grunted, but, as he crept forward, intending to call softly, she disappeared. Don Haskins had deserted the stolen taxicab two miles down the road; by cautious questioning he had learned the location of Greenacres and had walked the rest of the way, and here he was. It had been a troubling problem as to how he would get in touch with Helen. He had thought of going into the village and calling her on the telephone, but there were objections to this plan. In the first place he did not want to risk an appearance in the village; added to that, it might be bad business calling her to the phone so late at night. It had been his tentative idea to find a hiding place on the spacious estate until he could get in touch with her. Already he had considered the stable as a likely place for his purpose. "That's her room," he told himself, still looking up at the lighted window. "Now, if she was alone----" He crept closer to the house the better to study the situation, and he found it very much to his liking. The window of Helen's room opened out on the roof of the veranda which semicircled the house on two sides. It might be risky business, but a desperate man, the prospect of the death chair looking him in the face, does not stop to weigh such minor risks as this. He reached an almost instant decision. He sat down in the grass and removed his shoes; tying the laces together, he swung them about his neck. "I never done no porch climbin'," he muttered, "but it don't look so hard."