Her feet were in her slippers, her hand on the electric light switch. All the while she continued to listen intently. Dead silence everywhere... But how had burglars got in without starting the alarm? Ah--she remembered! Powder had orders never to set it while any one was out of the house; it was Dexter who should have seen that it was connected when he got back from Greystock with Lita. And naturally he had forgotten to. Pauline was on her feet, her hair smoothed back under her fillet-shaped cap of silver lace, her "rest-gown" of silvery silk slipped over her night-dress. This emergency garb always lay at her bedside in case of nocturnal alarms, and she was equipped in an instant, and had already reconnected the burglar-alarm, and sounded the general summons for Powder, the footmen, the gardeners and chauffeurs. Her hand played irresolutely over the complicated knobs of the glittering switchboard which filled a panel of her dressing-room; then she pressed the button marked "Engine-house." Why not? There had been a series of bad suburban burglaries lately, and one never knew... It was just as well to rouse the neighbourhood... Dexter was so careless. Very likely he had left the front door open. Silence still--profounder than ever. Not a sound since that second shot, if shot it was. Very softly she opened her door and paused in the anteroom between her room and her husband's. "Dexter!" she called. No answer; no responding flash of light. Men slept so heavily. She opened, lighted--"Dexter!" The room was empty, her husband's bed unslept in. But then--what? Those sounds of his return? Had she been dreaming when she thought she heard them? Or was it the burglars she had heard, looting his room, a few feet off from where she lay? In spite of her physical courage a shiver ran over her... But if Dexter and Lita were not yet back, whence had the sound of the shot come, and who had fired it? She trembled at the thought of Nona--Nona and the baby! They were alone with the baby's nurse on the farther side of the house. And the house seemed suddenly so immense, so resonant, so empty... In the shadowy corridor outside her room she paused again for a second, straining her ears for a guiding sound; then she sped on, pushing back the swinging door which divided the farther wing from hers, turning on the lights with a flying hand as she ran... On the deeply carpeted floors her foot-fall made no sound, and she had the sense of skimming over the ground inaudibly, like something ghostly, disembodied, which had no power to break the hush and make itself heard...