She was morally certain now that someone else was in the room.  She could see nothing, hear nothing, but in the dark she felt the presence of another human being.  She recalled Nancy’s experience.

“Perhaps it wasn’t her imagination, after all,” she thought.

The thing was to get back to the door and out of it.  Billie wished with all her soul she had never come in at all.  It had been a reckless, silly notion.  Why should her father need a pistol?  After all, it was just some roisterer on his way home from the festival.  She had heard that sake, the Japanese brandy, made the men who drank it wild, no doubt wild enough to shoot off a pistol in the suburbs where there were no policemen about to interfere.

And all because she had heard this pistol shot, she had obeyed a foolish impulse to find her father’s pistol.  How reckless!  How foolhardy!  How stupid!  Because, to come right down to a fine point, here she was shut up in a perfectly huge room, as black as the pit, with—­someone else!

Never in all her experience had Billie been so frightened.  Her knees knocked together and her head was quite giddy as she made her way unsteadily toward the door, still with the pistol in her left hand.

But she seemed to have lost all sense of direction.  Groping with her right hand, she encountered a chair.  There had been no chairs in the way before,—­was it an hour ago or only a minute?

It would be better to get to the wall and feel her way along the shelves until she reached the door.

Why was she so panic-stricken?  After all was she so sure about that other person crouching somewhere—­anywhere?

Then the thing happened that she had known was going to happen all the time.

Reaching out in the dark, she encountered an arm.  Instantly her right hand was seized in a grip of steel.  There was a struggle.  She was thrown to the floor; a shot; a cry—­was it her own or another person’s voice?  Then absolute silence.

When Billie came back to consciousness, she was lying on a couch in the library.  Miss Helen was kneeling beside her with the smelling salts.  Mary was bathing her forehead with cold water and her father was chafing her wrists and saying in a low voice: 

“You are not hurt, are you, Billie-girl?  There, speak to father.  Are you all right?”

There seemed to be a great many other people scattered about the room, the guests and the servants and her own particular friends leaning over her anxiously.

“I hope I didn’t kill him?” she said weakly.

Mr. Campbell could not refrain from smiling.

“You are just a little girl after all, Billie,” he said.  “No, you didn’t kill him, but you hit him.  Look at that.”  He pointed to some blood spots on the rug.  “You certainly winged him, whoever he was.  In some way, he escaped.  I don’t know how, because we were in the hall when the shot was fired and the windows are still locked.  He may have got out through the servants’ quarters but that would have been difficult, too, without being seen.”