I dared not strike a match because of the sharp, rasping noise it would make, and I had to be as cautious as if I were treading with bare feet on glass, although I knew that Maxine was praying for me to be out of the house, and I was as far from wishing to linger as she was to have me stay.  Only by a miracle did I save myself once or twice from upsetting a chair or a tall vase of flowers, on my way to a second door which was locked on the other side.  At last, however, I discovered a window, and congratulated myself that my trouble and Maxine’s danger was nearly over.  The room being on the ground floor, though rather high above the level of the garden, I thought that I could easily let myself down.  But when I had slipped behind the heavy curtains (they were drawn, and felt smooth, like satin) it was only to come upon a new difficulty.

The window, which opened in the middle like most French windows, was tightly closed, with the catch securely fastened; and as I began slowly and with infinite caution to turn the handle, I felt that the window was going to stick.  Perhaps the wood had been freshly painted:  perhaps it had swelled; in any case I knew that when the two sashes consented to part they would make a loud protest.

After the first warning squeak I stopped.  In the next room Maxine raised her voice—­to cover the sound, I was sure.  Then it had been worse even than I fancied!  I dared not begin again.  I would grope about once more, and see if I could hit upon some other way out, which possibly I had missed.

No, there was nothing.  No other window, except a small one which apparently communicated with a pantry, and even if that had not seemed too small for me to climb through, it was fastened on the pantry side.

What to do I did not know.  It would be a calamity for Maxine if du Laurier should hear a sound, and insist on having the door opened, after she had given him the impression (if she had not said it in so many words) that there was no stranger in the house.

Probably she hoped that by this time I was gone; but how could I go?  I felt like a rat in a trap:  and if I had been a nervous woman I should have imagined myself stifling in the small, hot room with its closed doors and windows.  As it was, I was uncomfortable enough.  My forehead grew damp, as in the first moments of a Turkish bath, and absent mindedly I felt in pocket after pocket for my handkerchief.  It was not to be found.  I must have lost it at the hotel, or the detective’s, or in the automobile I had hired.  In an outside pocket of my coat, however, I chanced upon something for the existence of which I couldn’t account.  It was a very small something:  only a bit of paper, but a very neatly folded bit of paper, and I remembered how it had fallen from my pocket onto the floor, and a gendarme had picked it up.