Her cries of distress awakened him. His feet came to the floor and he swung his body upright. Then he heard. He arose and took three steps to the head of the stairs. He was unconscious that he had reached out and picked up a small wooden stool that stood beside his bed to hold a candle or water. He looked down the stairway. At its foot stood, what, to the boy, seemed to be a monster fashioned from unyielding steel into the shape of an inexorable ogre. The distortion of Martin Moreland’s face seen from the angle at which the boy was standing, was hideous. His mouthing threats were terrifying. His uplifted hand was dripping blood. Something tightened in the breast of the boy and arose in his throat, creeping back to his brain. Even as he gazed, there mingled with the terror he knew a slow wonder, for he was on a line with the locked door—that door inside which he had never had a glimpse. It opened into a room full of light; he saw beautiful furniture, dainty things, and silken hangings. Beside Martin Moreland, trying to block his way, clinging to him, there was a woman, a stranger woman, a woman that the boy never before had seen. She was wearing an exquisite wrapper of snowy white, foaming with laces, falling to her feet and heaping there as if she stood in a drift of snow. At this apparition, Jason stared in dull wonder. Through the paralysis of terror in his brain there filtered the thought that Marcia could be made to look like that when the day came that he could give her beautiful clothing and such a room. A white ray of moonlight from the open window beside him fell on the boy and lighted the stairway. He saw the banker’s awful hand crash against the breast of the woman. He heard her cry of pain and pleading. He heard the thick, shaking voice shout: “Save your damned mouthing! The chances are that I _will_ kill him before I get through with him this time!” The woman, in her feathery laces, was thrown aside; Martin Moreland started up the stairway two steps at a time. When he was nearly two thirds of the way up, Jason moved, the wooden stool curved a circle around his head; then it crashed down with the combined strength of his two arms of desperation. Martin Moreland uttered a guttural, rasping grunt. He clutched at the smooth sides of the walls but there was no supporting rail. Slowly his body curved backward and went crashing down, and into the arms that were stretched out, he fell, bearing the woman to the floor with him. Staring dully, Jason saw her struggle up; saw her stretch the form of the banker at the foot of the stairs; saw a hand reach across him to close the door.