Then she struck into the West Haven way and soon slipped under the black mass of the old store. The night was cloudy and still. No wind blew and the sigh of the sea beneath the shelving beaches close at hand, had sunk to a murmur. West Haven lay lost in darkness. The old store had been searched, as many other empty buildings, for the fugitive; but he was not specially associated with this place, save in the mind of Estelle. The police had hunted it carefully, no more, and she guessed that his eerie under the roof, only reached by a somewhat perilous climb through a broken window, would not be discovered. She remembered also that there were some students of Raymond's murder who did not associate Abel with it. Such held that only accident and coincidence had made him run away on the night of Ironsyde's end. They argued that in these cases the obvious always proved erroneous, and the theory most transparently rational seldom led the way to the truth. But she had never doubted about that. It seemed already a commonplace of knowledge, a lifetime old, that Abel had destroyed his father, and that he must be insane to have ruined his own life in this manner. She ascended cautiously through the darkness, reached a gap--once a window--from which her ascent must be made, and listened for a few moments to hear if anything stirred above her. It seemed as though the old store was full of noises, for the fingers of decay never cease from picking and, in the silence of night, one can best hear their stealthy activities. Little falls of fragments sounded loudly, even echoed, in this great silence. There was almost a perpetual rustle and whisper; and once a thud and skurry, when a rat displaced a piece of mortar which fell from the rotting plaster. Dark though the heaven was and black the outer night, it had the quality that air never loses and she saw the sky as possessed of illumination in contrast with its setting of the broken window. Within all was blankly black; from above there came no sound. She climbed to the window ledge, felt for the nails that Abel had hammered in to hold his feet and soon ascended through a large gap under the eaves of the store. Some shock had thrown out a piece of brickwork here. Seen from the ground the aperture looked trifling and had indeed challenged no attention; but it was large enough to admit a man. For a moment Estelle stood in this aperture before entering the den within. She raised her voice, which fluttered after her climb, and called to him. "Abel! Abel! It's Estelle."