"No. There's a screen at the end of my bed. He could not see far into the room. But I shudder to think that tonight I've had an assassin a dozen feet from me while I slept," she added.

Finding that she could throw no light upon the mysterious affair, the officer turned his attention to the four frightened domestics, each in turn. All, save one, declared that they heard not a single sound. The one exception was Alice, the under housemaid, a young fair-haired girl, who stated that during the night she had distinctly heard a sound like the low creaking of light shoes on the landing below where they slept.

This first aroused our interest, but on full reflection it seemed so utterly improbable that an assassin would wear a pair of creaky boots when on such an errand that we were inclined to disregard the girl's statement as a piece of imagination. The feminine mind is much given to fiction on occasions of tragic events.

But the girl over and over again asserted that she had heard it. She slept alone in a small room at the top of the second flight of stairs and had heard the sound quite distinctly.

"When you heard it what did you do?"

"I lay and listened."

"For how long?"

"Oh, quite a quarter of an hour, I should think. It was just before half-past one when I heard the noise, for the church clock struck almost immediately afterwards. The sound of the movement was such as I had never before heard at night, and at first I felt frightened. But I always lock my door, therefore I felt secure. The noise was just like someone creeping along very slowly, with one boot creaking."

"But if it was so loud that you could hear it with your door closed, it is strange that no one else heard it," the detective-sergeant remarked dubiously.

"I don't care what anybody else heard, I heard it quite plainly," the girl asserted.

"How long did it continue?" asked the detective.

"Oh, only just as though someone was stealing along the corridor. We often hear movements at nights, because Short is always astir at two o'clock, giving the master his medicine. If it hadn't ha' been for the creaking I should not have taken notice of it. But I lay quite wide awake for over half an hour--until Short came banging at our doors, telling us to get up at once, as we 

 Prev. P 25/194 next