It was not that Durkin, at this stage of the kaleidoscopic game, was given to wasting tissue in unnecessary worry. But there had been that mysterious cigar-light in the hallway. When he had glanced cautiously down through the darkness, leaning well out over the bannister, he had distinctly seen the little glow of light. Yet, with the exception of his own top-floor rooms, the building was given over to business offices, and by night he had invariably found the corridors empty and unused. No Holmes watchman, no patrolman, not even a Central Office man, he knew, indulged in fragrant Carolina Perfectos when covering his beat. But when he descended quietly to reconnoitre, he saw that no one went down to the street door. And no one, he could see equally well, remained on the stairs or in the halls, for he turned on the light, floor by floor, as he went back to his rooms. Yet nobody, again, intelligently trying to secrete himself, would thus flaunt a lighted cigar in the darkness. From the suave and mellow odor of that cigar, too, Durkin knew that the intruder was something more than the ordinary house-thief and night-hawk. As he thought the matter over, comfortably lounging back in a big arm-chair up in his rooms, he tried to force himself to the pacifying conclusion that the whole affair was fortuitous. He would keep a weather-eye open for such casual occurrences, in the future; but he now had no time to bother with the drifting shadows of uncertainty. He had already that day faced more material dangers; there were more substantial perils, he knew, rising up about him. He flung himself back, with a sigh, after looking at his watch, and through the upward-threading drifts of his cigar smoke he wondered, half-reprovingly, what was taking place in the house not two hundred yards away from him, where Frances was so wakefully watching and working, while he sat there, idly waiting—since waiting, for once, was to be part of the game. He afterward decided that in his sheer weariness of body and mind he must have dozed off into a light sleep. It was past midnight when he awoke with a start, a vague sense of impending evil heavy upon him. His first thought, on awakening, was that some one had knocked. He glanced at his watch, as he sprang to open the door. It was on the point of one. Frank should have been back an hour ago. Then he _had_ fallen asleep, of a certainty, he decided, with electric rapidity of thought. But this was she, come at last, he conjectured. Yet, with that sense of impending danger still over him, he stepped back and turned off the lights. Then he quietly and cautiously opened the door. No one was there. He peered quickly down through the gloom of the hallways, but still neither sound nor movement greeted him.