All was still—­still and uncommonly dark.  Along the corridor on which his room was situated the snores of sleeping domestics exploded, growled and twittered in the air.  Every menial on the list seemed to be snoring, some in one key, some in another, some defiantly, some plaintively; but the main fact was that they were all snoring somehow, thus intimating that, so far as this side of the house was concerned, the coast might be considered clear and interruption of his plans a negligible risk.

Researches made at an earlier hour had familiarized him with the geography of the place.  He found his way to the green-baize door without difficulty and, stepping through, was in the hall, where the remains of the log fire still glowed a fitful red.  This, however, was the only illumination, and it was fortunate that he did not require light to guide him to the museum.

He knew the direction and had measured the distance.  It was precisely seventeen steps from where he stood.  Cautiously, and with avoidance of noise, he began to make the seventeen steps.

He was beginning the eleventh when he bumped into somebody—­ somebody soft—­somebody whose hand, as it touched his, felt small and feminine.

The fragment of a log fell on the ashes and the fire gave a dying spurt.  Darkness succeeded the sudden glow.  The fire was out.  That little flame had been its last effort before expiring, but it had been enough to enable him to recognize Joan Valentine.

“Good Lord!” he gasped.

His astonishment was short-lived.  Next moment the only thing that surprised him was the fact that he was not more surprised.  There was something about this girl that made the most bizarre happenings seem right and natural.  Ever since he had met her his life had changed from an orderly succession of uninteresting days to a strange carnival of the unexpected, and use was accustoming him to it.  Life had taken on the quality of a dream, in which anything might happen and in which everything that did happen was to be accepted with the calmness natural in dreams.

It was strange that she should be here in the pitch-dark hall in the middle of the night; but—­after all—­no stranger than that he should be.  In this dream world in which he now moved it had to be taken for granted that people did all sorts of odd things from all sorts of odd motives.

“Hello!” he said.

“Don’t be alarmed.”

“No, no!”

“I think we are both here for the same reason.”

“You don’t mean to say—­”

“Yes; I have come here to earn the five thousand dollars, too, Mr. Marson.  We are rivals.”

In his present frame of mind it seemed so simple and intelligible to Ashe that he wondered whether he was really hearing it the first time.  He had an odd feeling that he had known this all along.

“You are here to get the scarab?”

“Exactly.”

Ashe was dimly conscious of some objection to this, but at first it eluded him.  Then he pinned it down.