Surely my fears were but an overwrought imagination and the strangeness of the situation, acting upon a mind eagerly grasping out after adventure, being set free from the oppression of those dreadful years of bondage!

I had actually swung around when I heard the ghostly patter of the feet again close at my side.  I made my decision in that instant, and hurried swiftly on my course back toward the apartment house.

I was in Tenth Street now.  It was half-past two in the morning, and beginning to grow cold.  The thoroughfare was empty.  I fled, a tiny thing, between two rows of high, dark houses.

When at last I found my door my hands were trembling so that I could hardly fit the key into the lock.

I wondered now whether it had not been the pattering of my heart that I had heard.

I bounded up the stairs.  But on the top story I had to pause to get my breath, and then I dared not enter.  I listened outside.  There was no sound from within.

The two rooms that I occupied were separated only by a curtain, which fell short a foot from the floor and was slung on a wooden pole, disclosing two feet between the top of it and the ceiling.  The rooms were thus actually one, and even that might have been called small, for the bed in the rear room was not a dozen paces from the door.

I listened for the breathing of the sleeping girl.  My intelligence cried out upon my folly, telling me that my appearance there would terrify her; and yet that clamorous fear that beat at my heart would not be silenced.

If I could hear her breathe, I thought, I would go quietly away, and find a hotel in which to sleep.  I listened minute after minute, but I could not hear a sound.

At last I put my mouth to the keyhole and spoke to her.  “Jacqueline,” I called.  The name sounded as strange and sweet on my own lips as it had sounded on hers when she told it to me.  I waited.

There was no answer.

Then a little louder:  “Jacqueline!”

And then quite loudly:  “Jacqueline!”

I listened, dreading that she would cry out in alarm, but the same dead silence followed.

Then, out of the silence, hammering on my eardrums, burst the loud ticking of the little alarm-clock that I had left on the mantel of the bedroom.  I heard that, and it must have been ticking minutes before the sound reached me; perhaps if I waited a little longer I should hear her breathing.

The alarm-clock was one of that kind which, when set to “repeat,” utters a peculiar little click every two hundred and eighth stroke owing to a catch in the mechanism.  Formerly it had annoyed me inexpressibly, and I would lie awake for hours waiting for that tiny sound.  Now I could hear even that, and heard it repeat and repeat itself; but I could not hear Jacqueline breathe.

I took the key of the apartment door from my pocket at last and fitted it noiselessly into the lock.  I stood there, trembling and irresolute.  I dared not turn the key.  The hall door gave immediately upon the rooms without a private passage, and at the moment when I opened the door I should be practically inside my bedroom save for the intervening curtain.