ore he found it a sound
startled him.

It was the soft faint panting of some one breathing.

He was a man whose nerves were under the best of control, but the cold
feet of mice pattered up and down his spine. Something was wrong. The
sixth sense of danger that comes to some men who live constantly in
peril was warning him.

"Who's there?" he asked sharply.

No voice replied, but there was a faint rustle of some one or some
thing stirring.

He waited, crouched in the darkness.

There came another vague rustle of movement. And presently another,
this time closer. Every sense in him was alert, keyed up to closest
attention. He knew that some one, for some sinister purpose, had come
into this apartment and been trapped here by him.

The moments flew. He thought he could hear his hammering heart. A
stifled gasp, a dozen feet from him, was just audible.

He leaped for the sound. His outflung hand struck an arm and slid down
it, caught at a small wrist, and fastened there. In the fraction of a
second left him he realized, beyond question, that it was a woman he
had assaulted.

The hand was wrenched from him. There came a zigzag flash of lightning
searing his brain, a crash that filled the world for him--and he
floated into unconsciousness.

CHAPTER VII

FOUL PLAY

Lane came back painfully to a world of darkness. His head throbbed
distressingly. Querulously he wondered where he was and what had taken
place.

He drew the fingers of his outstretched hand along the nap of a rug and
he knew he was on the floor. Then his mind cleared and he remembered
that a woman's hand had been imprisoned in his just before his brain
stopped functioning.

Who was she? What was she doing here? And what under heaven had hit
him hard enough to put the lights out so instantly?

He sat up and held his throbbing head. He had been struck on the point
of the chin and gone down like an axed bullock. The woman must have
lashed out at him with some weapon.

In his pocket he found a match. It flared up and lit a small space in
the pit of blackness. Unsteadily he got to his feet and moved toward
the door. His mind was quite clear now and his senses abnormally
sensitive. For instance, he was aware of a faint perfume of violet in
the room, so faint that he had not noticed it before.

There grew on him a horror, an eagerness to be gone from the rooms. It
was based on no reasoning, but on some obscure feeling tha