The whole place was ghostly, full of shadows, shivery with possibilities.  It was Mr. Harbison finally who took Jim’s candle and crawled through the aperture.  We waited in dead silence, listening to his feet crunching over the coal beyond, watching the faint yellow light that came through the ragged opening in the wall.  Then he came back and called through to us.

“Place is locked, over here,” he said.  “Heavy oak door at the head of the steps.  Whoever made that opening has done a prodigious amount of labor for nothing.”

The weapon, a crowbar, lay on the ground beside the bricks, and he picked it up and balanced it on his hand.  Dallas’ florid face was almost comical in his bewilderment; as for Jimmy—­he slammed a piece of slag at the furnace and walked away.  At the door he turned around.

“Why don’t you accuse me of it?” he asked bitterly.  “Maybe you could find a lump of coal in my pockets if you searched me.”

He stalked up the stairs then and left us.  Dallas and I went up together, but we did not talk.  There seemed to be nothing to say.  Not until I had closed and locked the door of my room did I venture to look at something that I carried in the palm of my hand.  It was a watch, not running—­a gentleman’s flat gold watch, and it had been hanging by its fob to a nail in the bricks beside the aperture.

In the back of the watch were the initials, T.H.H. and the picture of a girl, cut from a newspaper.

It was my picture.

Chapter XVI.  I FACE FLANNIGAN

Dinner waited that night while everybody went to the coal cellar and stared at the hole in the wall, and watched while Max took a tracing of it and of some footprints in the coal dust on the other side.

I did not go.  I went into the library with the guilty watch in the fold of my gown, and found Mr. Harbison there, staring through the February gloom at the blank wall of the next house, and quite unconscious of the reporter with a drawing pad just below him in the area-way.  I went over and closed the shutters before his very eyes, but even then he did not move.

“Will you be good enough to turn around?” I demanded at last.

“Oh!” he said wheeling.  “Are you here?”

There wasn’t any reply to that, so I took the watch and placed it on the library table between us.  The effect was all that I had hoped.  He stared at it for an instant, then at me, and with his hand outstretched for it, stopped.

“Where did you find it?” he asked.  I couldn’t understand his expression.  He looked embarrassed, but not at all afraid.

“I think you know, Mr. Harbison,” I retorted.

“I wish I did.  You opened it?”

“Yes.”

We stood looking at each other across the table.  It was his glance that wavered.

“About the picture—­of you,” he said at last.  “You see, down there in South America, a fellow hasn’t much to do in the evenings, and a—­a chum of mine and I—­we were awfully down on what we called the plutocrats, the—­the leisure classes.  And when that picture of yours came in the paper, we had—­we had an argument.  He said—­” He stopped.