dea of her surroundings.
But she could, at last, hear. Voices, one of which she recognized as
Danglar's, though she could not distinguish the words, reached her from
upstairs.

Slowly, with infinite care, she crossed to the stairs, and on hands and
knees now, lest she should make a sound, began to crawl upward. And a
little way up, panic fear seized upon her again, and her heart stood
still, and she turned a miserable face in the darkness back toward the
door below, and fought against the impulse to retreat again.

And then she heard Danglar speak, and from her new vantage point his
words came to her distinctly this time:

"Good work, Skeeny! You've got the Sparrow nicely trussed up, I see.
Well, he'll do as he is for a while there. I told the boys to hold off a
bit. It's safer to wait an hour or two yet, before moving him away from
here and bumping him off."

"Two jobs instead of one!" a surly voice answered. "We might just as
well have finished him and slipped him away for keeps when we first got
our hooks on him."

"Got a little sick of your wood-carving, while you stuck around by your
lonesome and watched him--eh?" Danglar's tones were jocularly facetious.
"Don't grouch, Skeeny! We're not killing for fun--it doesn't pay.
Supposing anything had broken wrong up the Avenue--eh? We wouldn't have
had our friend the Sparrow there for the next time we tried it!"

There was something abhorrently callous in the laugh that followed. It
seemed to fan into flame a smoldering fire of passionate anger in Rhoda
Gray's soul. And before it panic fled. Her hand felt upward for the next
stair-tread, and she crept on again, as a face seemed to rise before
her--not the Sparrow's face--a woman's face. It was a face that was
crowned with very thin white hair, and its eyes were the saddest she had
ever seen, and yet they were brave, steady old eyes that had not lost
their faith; nor had the old, care-lined face itself, in spite of
suffering, lost its gentleness and sweetness. And then suddenly it
seemed to change, that face, and become wreathed in smiles, and happy
tears to run coursing down the wrinkled cheeks. Yes, she remembered! It
had brought the tears to her own eyes. It was the night that the wayward
Sparrow, home from the penitentiary, on his knees, his head buried in
his mother's lap, had sworn that he would go straight.

Fear! It seemed as though she never had known, never could know
fear--that only a merciless, tigerish,