The sound of her weeping was very pitiful, her attitude was full of an utter and poignant despair, there was something touching in the extreme in the utter abandonment to grief shown by this young and lovely creature who seemed framed only for joy and laughter.

The stern features and hard eyes of the unseen watcher softened, then all at once they grew like tempered steel again.

For on the mantlepiece, just above where the weeping girl crouched, stood a photograph—­the photograph of a young and good-looking, gaily-smiling man.  Across it, in a boyish and somewhat unformed hand, was written

“Devotedly yours,
Charley Wright.”

It was this photograph that had caught Dunn’s eyes.  Both it and the writing and the signature he recognized, and his look was very stern, his eyes as cold as death itself, as slowly, slowly he pushed back the door of the room another inch or so.

CHAPTER V

A WOMAN AND A MAN

The girl stirred.  It was as though some knowledge of the slow opening of the door had penetrated to her consciousness before as yet she actually saw or heard anything.

She rose to her feet, drying her eyes with her handkerchief, and as she was moving to a drawer near to get a clean one her glance fell on the partially-open door.

“I thought I shut it,” she said aloud in a puzzled manner.

She crossed the floor to the door and closed it with a push from her hand and in the passage outside Dunn stood still, not certain what to do next.

But for that photograph he might have gone quietly away, giving up the reckless plan that had formed itself so suddenly in his mind while he watched the burglar at work.

That photograph, however, with its suggestion that he stood indeed on the brink of the solution of the mystery, seemed a summons to him to go on.  It was as though a voice from the dead called him to continue on his task to punish and to save, and slowly, very slowly, with an infinite caution, he turned again the handle of the door and still very slowly, still with the same infinite caution, he pushed back the door the merest fraction of an inch at a time so that not even one watching could have said that it moved.

When he had it once more so far open that he could see within, he bent forward to look.  The girl was beginning her preparations for the night now.  She had assumed a long, comfortable-looking dressing-gown and, standing in front of the mirror, she had just finished brushing her hair and was beginning to fasten it up in a long plait.  He could see her face in the mirror; her deep, sad eyes, swollen with crying, her cheeks still tear-stained, her mouth yet quivering with barely-repressed emotion.

He was still watching her when, as if growing uneasy, she turned her head and glanced over her shoulder, and though he moved back so quickly that she did not catch sight of him, she saw that the door was open once more.