swiftly now, having come to his decision, and only shot one quick look
up at the house as he approached it. With what had his father shut
himself up within that house for twenty years? And was it there still?
And was it from that that Benjamin Corvet had fled? He saw no one in
the street, and was certain no one was observing him as, taking the key
from his pocket, he ran up the steps and unlocked the outer door.
Holding this door open to get the light from the street lamp, he fitted
the key into the inner door; then he closed the outer door. For fully
a minute, with fast beating heart and a sense of expectation of he knew
not what, he kept his hand upon the key before he turned it; then he
opened the door and stepped into the dark and silent house.

CHAPTER V

AN ENCOUNTER

Alan, standing in the darkness of the hall, felt in his pocket for his
matches and struck one on the box. The light showed the hall in front
of him, reaching back into some vague, distant darkness, and great
rooms with wide portiered doorways gaping on both sides. He turned
into the room upon his right, glanced to see that the shades were drawn
on the windows toward the street, then found the switch and turned on
the electric light.

As he looked around, he fought against his excitement and feeling of
expectancy; it was--he told himself--after all, merely a vacant house,
though bigger and more expensively furnished than any he ever had been
in except the Sherrills; and Sherrill's statement to him had implied
that anything there might be in it which could give the reason for his
father's disappearance would be probably only a paper, a record of some
kind. It was unlikely that a thing so easily concealed as that could
be found by him on his first examination of the place; what he had come
here for now--he tried to make himself believe--was merely to obtain
whatever other information it could give him about his father and the
way his father had lived, before Sherrill and he had any other
conversation.

Alan had not noticed, when he stepped into the hall in the morning,
whether the house then had been heated; now he appreciated that it was
quite cold and, probably, had been cold for the three days since his
father had gone, and his servant had left to look for him. Coming from
the street, it was not the chilliness of the house he felt but the
stillness of the dead air; when a house is heated, there is always some
motion of the air,