Webb’s house, and when I saw it I could not help connecting the rather stealthy gait of the man in front of me with a story I had lately heard of the large sum of money she was known to keep in her house.  Whether this was before or after this person disappeared round the corner I cannot say, but no sooner had I become certain that he was bent upon entering this house than my impulse to follow him became greater than my precaution, and turning aside from the direct path to the Zabels’, I hurried down High Street just in time to see the man enter Mrs. Webb’s front gateway.

“It was a late hour for visiting, but as the house had lights in both its lower and upper stories, I should by good rights have taken it for granted that he was an expected guest and gone on my way to the Zabels’.  But I did not.  The softness with which this person stepped and the skulking way in which he hesitated at the front gate aroused my worst fears, and after he had opened that gate and slid in, I was so pursued by the idea that he was there for no good that I stepped inside the gate myself and took my stand in the deep shadow cast by the old pear tree on the right-hand side of the walk.  Did anyone speak?”

There was a unanimous denial from the five gentlemen before her, yet she did not look satisfied.

“I thought I heard someone make a remark,” she repeated, and paused again for a half-minute, during which her smile was a study, it was so cold and in such startling contrast to the vivid glances she threw everywhere except behind her on the landing where Frederick stood listening to her every word.

“We are very much interested,” remarked Mr. Courtney.  “Pray, go on.”

Drawing her left hand from the balustrade where it had rested, she looked at one of her fingers with an odd backward gesture.

“I will,” she said, and her tone was hard and threatening.  “Five minutes, no longer, passed, when I was startled by a loud and terrible cry from the house, and looking up at the second-story window from which the sound proceeded, I saw a woman’s figure hanging out in a seemingly pulseless condition.  Too terrified to move, I clung trembling to the tree, hearing and not hearing the shouts and laughter of a dozen or more men, who at that minute passed by the corner on their way to the wharves.  I was dazed, I was choking, and only came to myself when, sooner or later, I do not know how soon or how late, a fresh horror happened.  The woman whom I had just seen fall almost from the window was a serving woman, but when I heard another scream I knew that the mistress of the house was being attacked, and rivetting my eyes on those windows, I beheld the shade of one of them thrown back and a hand appear, flinging out something which fell in the grass on the opposite side of the lawn.  Then the shade fell again, and hearing nothing further, I ran to where the object flung out had fallen, and feeling for it, found and picked up an old-fashioned dagger, dripping with blood.  Horrified beyond all expression, I dropped the weapon and retreated into my former place of concealment.