The middle pair of French windows were open, forming a double door.  Miss Cornelia went over to them—­shut them—­tried the locks.  Humph!  Flimsy enough! she thought.  Then she turned toward the billiard room.

The billiard room, as has been said, was the last room to the right in the main wing of the house.  A single door led to it from the living-room.  Miss Cornelia passed through this door, glanced about the billiard room, noting that most of its windows were too high from the ground to greatly encourage a marauder.  She locked the only one that seemed to her particularly tempting—­the billiard-room window on the terrace side of the house.  Then she returned to the living-room and again considered her defenses.

Three points of access from the terrace to the house—­the door that led into the alcove, the French windows of the living room—­the billiard-room window.  On the other side of the house there was the main entrance, the porch, the library and dining-room windows.  The main entrance led into a hall-living-room, and the main door of the living-room was on the right as one entered, the dining-room and library on the left, main staircase in front.  “My mind is starting to go round like a pinwheel, thinking of all those windows and doors,” she murmured to herself.  She sat down once more, and taking a pencil and a piece of paper drew a plan of the lower floor of the house.

And now I’ve studied it, she thought after a while, I’m no further than if I hadn’t.  As far as I can figure out, there are so many ways for a clever man to get into this house that I’d have to be a couple of Siamese twins to watch it properly.  The next house I rent in the country, she decided, just isn’t going to have any windows and doors—­or I’ll know the reason why.

But of course she was not entirely shut off from the world, even if the worst developed.  She considered the telephone instruments on a table near the wall, one the general phone, the other connecting a house line which also connected with the garage and the greenhouses.  The garage would not be helpful, since Slocum, her chauffeur for many years, had gone back to England for a visit.  Dale had been driving the car.  But with an able-bodied man in the gardener’s house—­

She pulled herself together with a jerk.

“Cornelia Van Gorder, you’re going to go crazy before nightfall if you don’t take hold of yourself.  What you need is lunch and a nap in the afternoon if you can make yourself take it.  You’d better look up that revolver of yours, too, that you bought when you thought you were going to take a trip to China.  You’ve never fired it off yet, but you’ve got to sometime today—­there’s no other way of telling if it will work.  You can shut your eyes when you do it—­no, you can’t either—­that’s silly.

“Call you a spirited old lady, do they?  Well, you never had a better time to show your spirit than now!”