With extreme caution he pushed it noiselessly up, and climbed in, and stood listening again in the black passage on the other side. When he had fully recovered his breath, and the knocking of his heart was stilled, he trod on softly, till turning the corner he came in sight of the kitchen door. It was now narrowly open, just enough, perhaps, to admit a cat; and as he softly approached, looking steadily in, he could see Ada sitting at the empty table, beneath the single whistling chandelier, in her black dress and black straw hat. She was reading apparently; but her back was turned to him and he could not distinguish her arm beyond the elbow. Then almost in an instant he discovered, as, drawn up and unstirring he gazed on, that she was not reading, but had covertly and instantaneously raised her eyes from the print on the table beneath, and was transfixedly listening too. He turned his eyes away and waited. When again he peered in she had apparently bent once more over her magazine, and he stole on. One by one, with a thin remote exultation in his progress, he mounted the kitchen stairs, and with each deliberate and groping step the voices above him became more clearly audible. At last, in the darkness of the hall, but faintly stirred by the gleam of lamplight from the chink of the dining-room door, he stood on the threshold of the drawing-room door and could hear with varying distinctness what those friendly voices were so absorbedly discussing. His ear seemed as exquisite as some contrivance of science, registering passively the least sound, the faintest syllable, and like it, in no sense meddling with the thought that speech conveyed. He simply stood listening, fixed and motionless, like some uncouth statue in the leafy hollow of a garden, stony, unspeculating. ‘Oh, but you either refuse to believe, Bettie, or you won’t understand that it’s far worse than that.’ Sheila seemed to be upbraiding, or at least reasoning with, the last speaker. ‘Ask Mr Danton—he actually _saw_ him.’