Ragg's door, but the door itself was still ajar. Julia rapped
sharply upon it and called the caretaker's name. When no one answered,
she pushed the door wide, and we saw, by the light of the candle I
carried, that the room was empty.

I scarcely knew why the fact that it was so filled us both with such
dismay. Our faces were white in the candlelight as we looked blankly at
each other; then, seizing hands, we scurried back to Julia's room. A
rush of cold air met us on the landing and our light went out.

"An outer door is open," Julia said.

We shut and locked our own door and stood together in the darkness,
gripping each other, intently listening.

Julia's senses are sharper than mine. "Someone is in the garden--at the
back," she whispered. "I can hear footsteps--footsteps of more than one
person. What shall we do, Isabella? I don't know yet what we ought to
do."

Presently we were kneeling at the window. The moon had set, the night
was quite dark. By degrees, straining our eyes in desperate anxiety, we
made out the stunted form of a shrub or two planted opposite the house;
we knew that the blackness of shadow at our left was the shed whose key
had been lost.

As we looked, the shed door opened. We knew it by the light which
suddenly streamed upon the night. It was the light from a lantern held
high, a light flickering and uncertain. It blinked and trembled and
swayed as if held in a shaking hand. We knew whose was the lean, lank
figure, fitfully revealed, which held it.

"What can she be doing there?" we asked of each other, with chattering
teeth, simultaneously.

Neither answered. There was no need. Too well we knew she was letting
out the men whom, to have them handy for our murder at night, she had
locked in, earlier in the day.

They came presently. The fluttering light gave us unsteady glimpses of
them, and of some large and heavy burden they carried.

"_What_ is it?" I demanded of Julia. My arm ached with her grip of it,
but she did not answer. All her senses were merged in the sense of
seeing. She could not hear, nor feel, nor speak.

Mrs Ragg, holding the lantern high, walked ahead of the obscure group,
which slowly followed. The light illumined her stooping, meagre figure
as she made her way down the path across the back garden to the gate.
Only now and again, by the chance swaying of the lantern, a ray lit the
heavy blackness of the mass moving in her wake.

She stopped with her lantern at the