better order than such a purpose required. Sooner or later somebody would touch a spring, and one discovery would lead to another. So we consoled each other as we resumed our search, almost forgetting that we ourselves might be discovered first.It was in a providential pause, broken only to my ear by our quiet movements, that Delavoye dabbed a quick hand on my candle and doused his own against the wall. Without a whisper he drew me downward, and there we cowered in throbbing darkness, but still not a sound that I could hear outside my skin. Then the floor above opened a lighted mouth with a gilded roof; black legs swung before our noses, found the step-ladder and came running down. The cigars were on the opposite side. The man knew all about them, found the right box without a light, and turned to go running up.

Now he must see us, as we saw him and his smooth, smug, flunkey's face to the whites of its upturned eyes! My fists were clenched--and often I wonder what I meant to do. What I did was to fall forward upon oozing palms as the trap-door was let down with a bang.

"Didn't he see us, Delavoye? Are you sure he didn't?" I chattered as he struck a match.

"Quite. I was watching his eyes--weren't you?"

"Yes--but they got all blurred at the finish."

"Well, pull yourself together; now's our time! It's an empty room overhead; it wasn't half lit up. But we haven't done anything, remember, if they do catch us."

He was on the steps already, but I had no desire to argue with him. I was as ripe for a risk as Delavoye, as anxious to escape after the one we had already run. The trap-door went up slowly, pushing something over it into a kind of tent.

"It's only the rug," purred Delavoye. "I heard him take it up--thank God--as well as put it down again. Now hold the candle; now the trap-door, till I hold it up for you."

And we squirmed up into a vast apartment, not only empty as predicted, but left in darkness made visible by the solitary light we carried now. The little stray flame was mirrored in a floor like black ice, then caught the sheen of the tumbled rug that Delavoye would stay to smooth, then twinkled in the diamond panes of bookcases like church windows, flickered over a high altar of a mantelpiece, and finally displayed our stealthy selves in the window by which we left the house.

"Thank God!" said Delavoye as he shut it down again. 

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