leather sheath.

They stepped silently into the passage. Dick locked the door and
pocketed the key.

"Quietly," he said, and as they crept towards the stairhead, he slid the
sheathed knife into the pocket of the tweed jacket.

CHAPTER XII.

THE STAIRS.

The passage ended in an arch, beyond which appeared a balustrade.

The corridor was wider than the archway; and Dick, having made the girl
hide behind its projection, stepped delicately out upon the square
landing, and looked over the rails.

The staircase mounted in a single broad flight from the floor of an
entrance hall larger and more pretentious than he had expected. The
attempt at an appearance of comfort was a failure, but money had been
spent, and a sort of bad harmony between furniture and decoration forced
itself upon the eye.

Across the hall, to the left, the front door stood open to the sunlight.
In the wall facing him and the stair's foot were two closed doors, and
others, doubtless, to match them, beneath the gallery on which he stood.

He had already made up his mind to lead the girl noiselessly down the
stair and through the open door, and thence to make, if necessary, a
running fight for it, with the chance of taking his pursuers in detail,
when he heard a man's steps, accompanied by a faint tinkle of china,
coming towards the hall, he judged, along the corridor immediately
beneath that which he and Amaryllis had used.

Something, he remembered, had been said of breakfast, to be sent up, and
he waited until there appeared, first the tray and then the man that
carried it; a thick-set fellow, with heavy boots, shabby clothes, and a
bald spot among the rough sandy hair of his crown.

It was plain that he was making for the stair, and Dick drew back behind
the projection of the arch, opposite to Amaryllis. He saw the questions
in her eyes and knew she could hear the approaching footsteps.

He made a gesture for silence; a silence which seemed to Amaryllis to
last immeasurable time, while tea-cup tinkled against milk-jug, ever
nearer and nearer.

She saw him take a swift glance through the arch at the comer she could
not see, draw back three steps up the passage, and start forward again
with a face that made her heart jump, and a terrific limping rush of
three or four strides to the stairhead. And she craned forward just in
time to see the man with the tray, two steps from the top, receive in
his stomach a kick which lifted, it seeme