Mr. Penfound had lived. He had lived adventurously and he had lived everywhere. He had slept under the stars and over the throbbing screws of ocean steamers. He knew the harbours of the British Empire, and the waste places of the unpeopled West, and the mysterious environs of foreign cities. He had been first mate of a tramp steamer, wood sawyer in Ontario, ganger on the Canadian Pacific Railway, clerk at a Rand mine, and land agent in California. It was the last occupation that had happened to yield the eighty thousand dollars which rendered him independent and established him so splendidly, at the age of forty, in Fulham, the place of his birth. Thin, shrewd, clear, and kindly, his face was the face of a man who has learnt the true philosophy of life. He took the world as he found it, and he found it good. To such a man an unexpected journey, even though it ended at a deserted and unprepared home, whose larder proved as empty as his stomach, was really nothing. By the time Mr. Penfound had locked up the house, turned out the light in the hall, and arrived in the bedroom, Mrs. Penfound was fast asleep. He sat down in the armchair by the window, charmed by the gentle radiance of the night, and unwilling to go to bed. Like most men who have seen the world, he had developed the instincts of a poet, and was something of a dreamer. Half an hour--or it might have been an hour: poets are oblivious of time--had passed, when into Mr. Penfound’s visions there entered a sinister element. He straightened himself stiffly in the chair and listened, smiling. “By Jove!” he whispered. “I do believe it’s a burglar. I’ll give the beggar time to get fairly in, and then we’ll have some fun.” It seemed to him that he heard a few clicking noises at the back of the house, and then a sound as if something was being shoved hard. “The dining-room window,” he said. In a few minutes it became perfectly evident to his trained and acute ear that a burglar occupied the dining-room, and accordingly he proceeded to carry out other arrangements. Removing his boots, he assumed a pair of soft, woollen house slippers which lay under the bed. Then he went to a chest of drawers, and took out two revolvers. Handling these lovingly, he glanced once at his sleeping wife, and, shod in the silent woollen, passed noiselessly out of the room. By stepping very close to the wall, so as to put as slight a strain as possible upon the woodwork, he contrived to descend to the half-landing without causing a sound, but on the half-landing itself there occurred an awful creak--a creak that seemed to reverberate into infinite space. Mr. Penfound stopped a second, but, perceiving the unwisdom of a halt, immediately proceeded.