Lelia, in a fury at her lover and her aunt, bounced angrily into her room, banging and locking the door against all intruders. Dismayed and angered by the intrusion, the burglars, with stifled oaths, hid themselves behind a tall wardrobe, swearing to each other in muffled oaths that they would like to wring her pretty neck. “Two minutes more and we should have been safely outside! Hang the luck! We shall have to stay mewed up here in this hole till she gets to bed and to sleep, so’s we can steal out!” “And if she comes in here we shall not dare breathe, for she would be sure to hear us, curse the luck!” They resigned themselves to waiting, believing that, as the hour was late, she could not possibly remain up but a few minutes. Her pretty eyes would soon be closed in sleep. But this was where they reckoned without their host. Instead of retiring, Lelia raged up and down her room like the cyclone to which Miss Cyrilla had likened her, raving against her lover and Gipsy, and calling down all sorts of evil on the latter’s head. “She’s a she-devil! Listen, how she hates everybody! Will she never have done raging? It’s half an hour now the vixen has been tearing up and down, and she ain’t tired out yet! If she keeps it up till daylight, where are we, I want to know? I propose that we rush in suddint on her, and wring her neck before she can holler; what say?” whispered Jack. “Done!” And grasping the precious case, they bolted through the open door into the room. Lelia, in her angry walk, had just turned, and she faced them with awful horror in her dilated blue eyes. She saw the jewel-case in one man’s arms, she saw the brutal menace in their faces--stared death, as it were, in the face, all in one horrible moment. A wild and piercing shriek rose to her blanched lips, but it was stifled in its birth by rough and brutal hands about the throat. Again a stifled groan, but it was strangled half-born in her throat by that vicious clutch, and only the faintest echo reached Laurie’s ears. But that was enough, coupled with Gipsy’s warnings. Then opportunely the doctor and Crawford appeared on the scene, and responded to the call for assistance. The door was crashed in, and they entered on the scene where the helpless Lelia was struggling in the grasp of the ruffian bent on murder. Startled, surprised, taken at a disadvantage by superior numbers, the pair of villains made a bold fight for liberty, but the contest was short, and ended in their utter discomfiture. In ten minutes Laurie and Crawford were each sitting down on their man, while the doctor hustled around for ropes to tie them. CHAPTER X. AN ANGEL UNAWARES. The good Doctor White had his hands full of patients after the mêlée. There was Lelia, in hysterics, with a bruised throat that would necessitate the wearing of a lace muffler for a week.