off the light in the front room, crossed in the darkness into the
second room, and pressed the switch.

A weird, uncanny, half wail, half moan, coming from the upper hall,
suddenly filled the house. Its unexpectedness and the nature of the
sound stirred the hair upon his head, and he started back; then he
pressed the switch again, and the noise stopped. He lighted another
match, found the right switch, and turned on the light. Only after
discovering two long tiers of white and black keys against the north
wall did Alan understand that the switch must control the motor working
the bellows of an organ which had pipes in the upper hall; it was the
sort of organ that can be played either with fingers or by means of a
paper roll; a book of music had fallen upon the keys, so that one was
pressed down, causing the note to sound when the bellows pumped.

But having accounted for the sound did not immediately end the start
that it had given Alan. He had the feeling which so often comes to one
in an unfamiliar and vacant house that there was some one in the house
with him. He listened and seemed to hear another sound in the upper
hall, a footstep. He went out quickly to the foot of the stairs and
looked up them.

"Is any one here?" he called. "Is any one here?"

His voice brought no response. He went half way up the curve of the
wide stairway, and called again, and listened; then he fought down the
feeling he had had; Sherrill had said there would be no one in the
house, and Alan was certain there was no one. So he went back to the
room where he had left the light.

The center of this room, like the room next to it, was occupied by a
library table-desk. He pulled open some of the drawers in it; one or
two had blue prints and technical drawings in them; the others had only
the miscellany which accumulates in a room much used. There were
drawers also under the bookcases all around the room; they appeared,
when Alan opened some of them, to contain pamphlets of various
societies, and the scientific correspondence of which Sherrill had told
him. He looked over the titles of some of the books on the shelves--a
multitude of subjects, anthropology, exploration, deep-sea fishing,
ship-building, astronomy. The books in each section of the shelves
seemed to correspond in subject with the pamphlets and correspondence
in the drawer beneath, and these, by their dates, to divide themselves
into different periods during the tw