CHAPTER IV

 IN THE DEAD OF NIGHT

 

Madge was asleep almost as soon as she was between the sheets, and it seemed to her that as soon as she was asleep she was awake again--waking with that sudden shock of consciousness which is not the most agreeable way of being roused from slumber, since it causes us to realise too acutely the fact that we have been sleeping. Something had woke her; what, she could not tell. She lay motionless, listening with that peculiar intensity with which one is apt to listen when woke suddenly in the middle of the night. The room was dark. There was the sound of distant rumbling: they were at work upon the line, where they would sometimes continue shunting from dusk to dawn. She could hear, faintly, the crashing of trucks as they collided the one with the other. A breeze was murmuring across the common. It came from Clapham Junction way--which was how she came to hear the noise of the shunting. All else was still. She must have been mistaken. Nothing had roused her. She must have woke of her own accord.

Stay!--what was that? Her keen set ears caught some scarcely uttered sound. Was it the creaking of a board? Well, boards will creak at night, when they have a trick of being as audible as if they were exploding guns. It came again--and again. It was unmistakably a board that creaked--downstairs. Why should a board creak like that downstairs, unless--it was being stepped upon? As Madge strained her hearing, she became convinced that there were footsteps down below--stealthy, muffled footsteps, which would have been inaudible had it not been for the tell-tale boards. Some one was creeping along the passage. Suddenly there was a noise as if a coin, or a key, or some small object, had fallen to the floor. Possibly it was something of the kind which had roused her. It was followed by silence--as if the person who had caused the noise was waiting to learn if it had been overheard. Then once more the footsteps--she heard the door of the sitting-room beneath her open, 

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