Bobby had told all he knew before they had reached the forest.  The doctor grunted then: 

“The wound at the back of the head was the same as in your grandfather’s case?”

“Exactly.”

“Then what good am I?  Why am I routed out?”

“A formality,” Bobby answered.  “Katherine thought if we got you quickly you might do something.  Anyway, she wanted your advice.”

The woods closed about them.  Again the lights seemed to push back a palpable barrier.

“I can’t work miracles,” the doctor was murmuring.  “I can’t bring men back to life.  Such a wound leaves no ground for hope.  You’d better have sent for the police at once.  Hello!”

He strained forward, peering around the windshield.

“Funny!” Paredes called.

Bobby’s eyes were on the road.

“What do you see?”

“The house, Bobby!” Paredes cried.

“No one, to my certain knowledge,” the doctor said, “has lived in that house for ten years.  You say it was empty and falling to pieces when you woke up there this morning.”

Bobby knew what they meant then, and he reduced the speed of the car and looked ahead to the right.  A pallid glow sifted through the trees from the direction of the deserted house.

Bobby guided the car to the side of the road, stopped it, and shut off the engine.  At first no one moved.  The three men stared as if in the presence of an unaccountable phenomenon.  Even when Bobby had extinguished the headlights the glow failed to brighten.  Its pallid quality persisted.  It seemed to radiate from a point close to the ground.

“It comes from the front of the house,” Bobby murmured.

He stepped from the automobile.

“What are you going to do?” Paredes wanted to know.

“Find out who is in that house.”

For Bobby had experienced a quick hope.  If there was a man or a woman secreted in the building the truth as to his own remarkable presence there last night might not be so far to seek after all.  There was, moreover, something lawless about this light escaping from the place at such an hour.  A little while ago, when Paredes and he had driven past, the house had been black.  They had remarked its lonely, abandoned appearance.  It had led Paredes to speak of the neighbourhood as the domain of death.  Yet the strange, pallid quality of the light itself made him pause by the broken fence.  It did come from the lower part of the front of the house, yet, so faint was it, it failed to outline the aperture through which it escaped.  The doctor and Paredes joined him.

“When I was here,” he said, “all the shutters were closed.  This glow is too white, too diffused.  We must see.”

As he started forward Paredes grasped his arm.

“There are too many of us.  We would make a noise.  Suppose I creep up and investigate.”

“There is one way in—­at the back,” Bobby told the doctor.  “Let us go there.  We’ll have whoever’s inside trapped.  Meantime, Carlos, if he wishes, will steal up to the front; he’ll find out where the light comes from.  He’ll look in if he can.”