ion to
carry them away and hide them, in my anxiety to secure this intruder and
hold him to a bitter account for the misery he was causing me, or whether
I only meant to satisfy myself that they were the habiliments of a
stranger and not those of some sneaking member of the club, is of little
importance in the light of the fact which presently burst upon me. The
hat and coat were gone. Nothing hung from the rack. The wall was free
from end to end. She had taken these articles of male apparel with her;
she had not gone forth into the driving snow, unprotected, but--

I did not know what to think. No acquaintanceship with her girlish
impulses, nothing that had occurred between us before or during this
night, had prepared me for a freak of this nature. I felt backward
along the wall; I felt forward; I even handled the pegs and counted
them as I passed to and fro, touching every one; but I could not alter
the fact. The groping she had done had been in this direction. She was
searching for this hat and coat (a man's hat,--a derby, as I had been
careful to assure myself at the first handling) and, in them, she had
gone home as she had probably come, and there was no man in the case,
or if there were--

The doubt drove me to the staircase. Making no further effort to unravel
the puzzle which only beclouded my faculties, I began my wary ascent. I
had not the slightest fear, I was too full of cold rage for that.

The arrangement of rooms on the second floor was well known to me. I
understood every nook and corner and could find my way about the whole
place without a light. I took but one precaution--that of slipping off
my shoes at the foot of the stairs. I wished to surprise the intruder. I
was willing to resort to any expedient to accomplish this. The matches I
carried in my pocket would make this possible if once I heard him
breathing. I held my own breath as I stole softly up, and waited for an
instant at the top of the stairs to listen. There was an awesome silence
everywhere, and I was hesitating whether to attack the front rooms first
or to follow up a certain narrow hall leading to a rear staircase, when
I remembered the thin line of smoke which, rising from one of the
chimneys, had first attracted my attention to the house. In that was my
clue. There was but one room on this floor where a fire could be lit.
It lay a few feet beyond me down the narrow hall I have just mentioned.
Why had I trusted everything to my ears