f possibility of carrying out his original
plan brought before him thoughts of his friends--those friends who,
through his exile, had been faithful to him but whose identity or
existence he had been obliged to deny, when questioned, to protect them
as well as himself.

As he lay on his bed in the dark, he stared upward to the ceiling, wide
awake, thinking of those friends whose devotion to him might be
justified at last; and he went over again and tested and reviewed the
plan he had formed. But it never had presumed a position for him--even
if it was the position of a semi-prisoner--inside Santoine's house.
And he required more information of the structure of the house than he
as yet had, to correct his plan further. But he could not, without too
great risk of losing everything, discover more that night; he turned
over and set himself to go to sleep.

CHAPTER XII

THE ALLY IN THE HOUSE

The first gray of dawn roused Eaton, and drawing on trousers and coat
over his pajamas, he seated himself by the open window to see the house
by daylight. The glow, growing in the east, showed him first that the
house stood on the shore of the lake; the light came to him across
water, and from the lake had come the crisp, fresh-smelling breeze that
had blown into his windows through the night. As it grew lighter, he
could see the house; it was an immense structure of smooth gray stone.
Eaton was in its central part, his windows looking to the south. To
the north of him was a wing he could not see--the wing which had
contained the porte-cochere under which the motor-car had stopped the
night before; and the upper part of this wing, he had been able to
tell, contained the servants' quarters. To the south, in front of him,
was another wing composed, apparently in part at least, of family
bedrooms.

Between the house and the lake was a terrace, part flagged, part
gravel, part lawn not yet green but with green shoots showing among the
last year's grass. A stone parapet walled in this terrace along the
top of the bluff which pitched precipitously down to the lake fifty
feet below, and the narrow beach of sand and shingle. As Eaton
watched, one of the two nurses who had been on the train came to a
window of the farthest room on the second floor of the south wing and
stood looking out; that, then, must be Santoine's room; and Eaton drew
back from his window as he noted this.

The sun had risen, and its beams, reflected up f