The door closed again whiningly, inclosing Don Haskins within the stairway. He considered it safe to light a match and did so to illuminate the upward climb. He saw accumulated dust, evidence of disuse; Greenacres servants were not good housekeepers above the second floor, it seemed. Without any difficulty he found the storeroom and, striking another match, discovered that a kindly circumstance had left a discarded couch for him to rest upon. He sat down on the edge of it and felt in his pocket for his package of cigarettes, and then something dawned upon him. The gun had been in his pocket after he had got inside the house; he remembered the touch of it, as he had sought out a cigarette. "Curse her!" he gritted. "She took that gat outta my pocket. What did she want with it, anyhow? I got a good notion to go back down there an'----" He lighted a fag and smoked nervously, indecisively. He wanted his gun. A desperate man feels safer with something to shoot with, but he could not quite make up his mind to risk a return to the second floor. Helen had returned to her room without detection. She switched on the lights again, but in her agitation forgot to lock the door behind her. Stunned, nervously exhausted by this new-conspiring circumstance, the appearance of Don, she sank down into a chair, and, as her arms dropped listlessly down, the gun which a few brief hours before had been the property of Detective Sergeant John Henry Tish of the New York police department slid down to the rug with a faint thud and lay at her feet. She made no move to pick it up. She faced the door, her eyes fixed vacantly upon nothing; hopelessness engulfed her. Don--her legal husband--here. Sarbella here, too. Both of them here with her under the same roof. No wonder that she was stunned, dazed; at times she felt that she must be in the midst of a terrible nightmare, that she would wake up with the grateful realization that it wasn't true. For perhaps ten minutes she sat motionless, surrendering any attempt to think coherently. Suddenly her lax nerves snapped taut, a gasp escaped her lips, her eyes widened. There had been no sound of a footstep in the hall, there had been no rap at the door, but the knob was turning slowly, silently, and the door began to move. CHAPTER IX THE OPEN DOOR The butler at Greenacres occupied a small room on the ground floor near the kitchen. He had been asleep for some time when the ringing of the doorbell sounded, a loud jangling in the night's stillness; he stirred, muttered grumblingly, and was about to tell himself that it must be a mistake, when the ring was insistently repeated.