But years of questionable practice had had an inevitable effect upon Maison.  Outwardly, he had hardened, but only Maison knew of the many devils his conscience created for him.

Continued communion with the devils of conscience had made a coward of Maison.  When at last he got up from the table he glanced apprehensively around the room; and after he had put out the light and climbed the stairs to his rooms above the bank, he was trembling.

Maison had often dealt crookedly with his fellow-men, but never, until the incident of Devil’s Hole, had he deliberately planned murder.  Thus tonight Maison’s conscience had more ghastly evidence to confront him with, and conscience is a pitiless retributive agent.

Maison poured himself a generous drink of whisky from a bottle on a sideboard before he got into bed, but the story told him by Dale and the others of the terrible scene at Devil’s Hole—­remained so staringly vivid in his thoughts that whisky could not dim it.

He groaned and pulled the covers over his head, squirming and twisting, for the night was warm and there was little air stirring.

After a while Maison sat up.  It seemed to him that he had been in bed for an age, though actually the time was not longer than an hour.

It had been late when he had left the room downstairs.  And now he listened for sounds that would tell him that Okar’s citizens were still busy with their pleasures.

But no sound came from the street.  Maison yearned for company, for he felt unaccountably depressed and morbid.  It was as though some danger impended and instinct was warning him of it.

But in the dead silence of Okar there was no suggestion of sound.  It must have been in the ghostly hours between midnight and the dawn—­though a cold terror that had gripped Maison would not let him get up to look at the clock that ticked monotonously on the sideboard.

He lay, clammy with sweat, every sense strained and acute, listening.  For, from continued contemplation of imaginary dangers he had worked himself into a frenzy which would have turned into a conviction of real danger at the slightest sound near him.

He expected sound to come; he waited for it, his ears attuned, his senses alert.

And at last sound came.

It was a mere creak—­such a sound as a foot might make on a stairway. 
And it seemed to have come from the stairs leading to Maison’s rooms.

He did not hear it again, though, and he might have fought off the new terror that was gripping him, if at that instant he had not remembered that when leaving the lower room he had forgotten to lock the rear door—­the door through which Morley had entered earlier in the evening; the door through which Silverthorn had departed.

He had not locked that door, and that noise on the stairs might have been made by some night prowler.

Aroused to desperation by his fears he started to get out of bed with the intention of getting the revolver that lay in a drawer in the sideboard.