I glanced toward the corner of the room where the safe stood, reliquary of a worthless thing for which much blood had been spilled.

Then sounded footsteps along the avenue, and my fear whispered that they were not those of Bristol but of one who had murdered him, and who came guilefully, to murder me!

I snatched the revolver from my pocket and crossed the darkened room.  Just to the right of one of the French windows I stood looking out across the loggia to the end of the avenue.  The night was a bright one, and the room was flooded with a reflected mystic light, but outside the moon paved the avenue with pearl, and through the trees I saw a figure approaching.

Was it Bristol?  It had his build, it had his gait; but my fears remained.  Then the figure crossed the patch of shrubbery and stepped on to the loggia.

“Mr. Cavanagh!”

I laughed dryly at my own cowardice, but my heart was still beating abnormally.

“Here I am, Bristol, in a ghastly funk!”

“I don’t wonder!  They may be on us any time now.  All’s well at the gate, but Morris says he heard, or thought he heard something at the side of the chapel opposite, a while ago.”

“Wind in the bushes?”

“It may have been; but he says there was no breeze at the time.”

We resumed our seats.

“Bristol,” I said, “now that the danger grows imminent, doesn’t it seem to you foolhardy for us thus to expose ourselves?”

“Perhaps it is,” he agreed; “but how otherwise are we likely to learn what happened to Marden and West?”

“The enemy may adopt different measures to-night.”

“I think not.  Our dispositions are the same, and I credit them with cunning enough to know it.  At the same time I credit ourselves with having kept the existence of the steel traps completely secret.  They will assume (so I’ve reasoned) that we intend to rely entirely upon our superior vigilance, therefore they will try the same game as last night.”

Silence fell.

The moon rays, creeping around from the right of the avenue, crossing the shrubbery and encroaching upon the low wall of the loggia, now flooded its floor.  Against the silvern light, Bristol appeared to me in black silhouette.  The breeze, too, seemed now to blow from a slightly different direction.  It came through the windows on my right, beyond which lay the unkempt bushes which extended on that side to the wall of the grounds.

So we sat, until the moonlight poured fully in upon Bristol’s back.  So we sat when the clock chimed the hour of one.

Bristol arose and once more went out to the gate.  He had arranged to visit Morris’s post every half-hour.  Again I experienced the nervous dread that he would be attacked in the avenue; but again he returned unscathed.

“All’s well,” he said.

But from his tones I knew that he had not forgotten that it was at this hour Marden and West had suffered mysterious attack.