Rachel felt tremulously in her pocket; there had been more keys than one, and that which had been in her possession when she was arrested was in it still.  Nobody had asked her for it; she had kept it for this; dare she use it after all?  The street was still empty; it is the quietest little street in Chelsea.  There would never be a better chance.

Rachel crept up the steps.  If she should be seen!

She was not; but a footstep rang somewhere in the night, and on that the key was fitted and the door opened without another moment’s hesitation.  Rachel entered, the door shut noisily behind her, and then her own step rang in turn upon the floor.  It was bare boards; and as Rachel felt her way to the electric switches, beyond the dining-room door, her fingers missed the pictures on the walls.  This prepared her for what she found when the white light sprang out above her head.  The house had been dismantled; not a stick in the rooms, not so much as a stair-rod on the stairs, nor a blind to the window at their head.

The furniture removed while the use of it belonged legally to her!  Had they made so sure of her conviction as all that?  Rachel’s blood came straight from zero to the boil; this was monstrous, this was illegal and wicked.  The house was hers for other two months; and there were things of hers in it, she had left everything behind her.  If they had been removed, then this outrage was little short of felony, and she would invoke the law from whose clutches she herself had escaped.  Rachel had expected to be terrified in the house; she was filled insted with anger and indignation.

It was as she expected; not a trunk had been left; and the removal had taken place that very week.  This would account for the electric light being still intact.  Rachel discovered it by picking up a crumpled newspaper, which seemed to have contained bread and cheese; it did contain a report of the first day of the trial.  They might have waited till her trial was over; they should suffer for their impatience, it was their turn.  So angry was Rachel that her own room wounded her with no memories of the past.  It was an empty room, and nothing more; and only on her return to the lower floor did that last dread night come back to her in all its horror and all its pitifulness.

The double doors of the late professor!  Rachel forgot her grudge against his widow; she pulled the outer door, and pushed the inner one, just as she had done in the small hours of that fatal morning, but this time all was darkness within.  She had to put on the electric light for herself.  The necessity she could not have explained, but it existed in her mind; she must see the room again.  And the first thing she saw was that the window was broken still.

Rachel looked at it more closely than she had done on the morning when she had given her incriminating opinion to the police, and the longer she looked the less reason did she see to alter that opinion.  The broken glass might have been placed upon the sill in order to promote the very theory which had been so gullibly adopted by the police, and the watch and chain hidden in the chimney for the same purpose.  They might have hanged the man who kept them; and surely this was not the first thief who had slunk away empty-handed after the committal of a crime infinitely greater than the one contemplated.