“Hello,” I said, “so you’re able to be up, are you?”

“Yes, sir,” he answered, without looking at me.  “I thought I’d come down and keep Parks company.”

Parks smiled a little sheepishly.

“I asked him to, Mr. Lester,” he said.  “I got so lonesome and jumpy here by myself that I just had to have somebody to talk to.  Especially, after the burglar-alarm rang.”

“The burglar-alarm?” repeated Godfrey quickly.  “What do you mean?”

“We’ve got a burglar-alarm on the windows, sir.  It’s usually turned off in the day-time, but I thought I’d better leave it on to-day, and it rang about the middle of the afternoon.  I thought at first that one of the other servants had raised a window, but none of them had.  Something went wrong with it, I guess.”

“Did you take a look at the windows?” I asked.

“Yes, sir; a policeman came to see what was the matter and we went around and examined the windows, but they were all locked.  It made me feel kind of scary for a while.”

“Does the alarm work now?”

“No, sir; the policeman said there must be a short circuit somewhere, and that he’d notify the people who put it in; but nobody has come around yet to fix it.”

“We’d better take a look at the windows, ourselves,” said Godfrey.  “You stay here, Parks.  We can find them, all right; and I don’t want you to leave that door unguarded for a single instant.”

We went from window to window, and Godfrey examined each of them with a minuteness that astonished me, for I had no idea what he expected to find.  But we completed the circuit of the ground floor without his apparently discovering anything out of the way.

“Let’s take a look at the basement,” he said, and led the way downstairs with a readiness which told me that he had been over the house before.

In the kitchen, we came upon the cook and housemaid sitting close together and talking in frightened whispers.  They watched us apprehensively, and I stopped to reassure them, while Godfrey proceeded with his search.  Then I heard him calling me.

I found him in a kind of lumber-room, standing before its single small window, his electric torch in his hand.

“Look there,” he said, his voice quivering with excitement, and threw a circle of light on the jamb of the window at the spot where the upper and lower sashes met.

“What is it?” I asked, after a moment.  “I don’t see anything wrong.”

“You don’t?  You don’t see that this house was to be entered to-night?  Then what does this mean?”

With his finger-nail, he turned up the end of a small insulated wire.  And then I saw that the wire had been cut.

CHAPTER XI

THE BURNING EYES

For an instant, I did not grasp the full significance of that severed wire.  Then I understood.

“Yes,” said Godfrey drily, “that romance of mine is looking up again.  Somebody was preparing for a quiet invasion of the house to-night —­somebody, of course, interested in that cabinet.”