“I told you so,” said Julia, “if you had listened to me. It isn’t a door at all, and leads to nowhere. It was once the door of the wing,” she continued, with the liking of a child for giving information, “but it has never once been opened since ever I was born.” “The wing! that’s them empty rooms as we see from the garden--the very place for a man to hide. Tell you what, sir, I can’t bear to upset the lady--but we must break in if we can’t get in quietly. You might try if you couldn’t get us the key, and take the ladies away--anyhow, get the old lady to go away--whatever happens, she’d better not be here.” Mrs. Harwood spoke quickly, in a hoarse and broken voice. “There is no key,” she said. “I give you five minutes to think of it, lady,” said the man; “otherwise we must break in the door.” There was a dreadful silence--a silence which no one dared to break. “I am telling you the truth; you cannot open it, it has always been shut up. There is no key.” CHAPTER XLI. The policeman’s epigrammatic assertion that it was difficult for a known man to struggle with the police, is still more true when it is only a door which stands before a couple of men excited and exasperated by failure and a probable discovery. The door was a strong door, it was partially plated with iron, and its lock was cunningly devised, but after a while it began to give way. Meredith, altogether absorbed in this new turn of affairs, and carried away by the prospect which it opened to him as well as to its assailants, seemed to the bystanders to have altogether gone over to the enemy. He stood by them, encouraging them in a low tone, suggesting how to strike, examining into the weak points with the keenest critical eye; in fact, in the excitement of the moment, forgetting all his precautions and pretence of indifference, and throwing himself on the side of the assailants. He had, it is true, the safe ground to fall back upon that, as he had always been assured there was nothing there, he could do no possible harm in helping to prove that fact to the men who would not be convinced in any other way. Mrs. Harwood sat with her face to the door, her arms crossed upon her breast, her whole frame swaying and moving with the strokes that rained upon it. When a crash came she shivered and shrank into herself as if the blow had struck her--a low moan came involuntarily to her lips. Gussy, who had abandoned Meredith after trying in vain to restrain him, came and stood by her mother’s chair, with a hand upon her shoulder. “Oh, mamma, for God’s sake,” said Gussy, in her ear, “don’t! Don’t let them see you mind it so.”