it really was,
owing to our knowledge of its semi-criminal mystery and of the human
secret locked below.

The basement floor had several doors, as is usual in such a house; doors
that would naturally lead to the kitchen, the scullery, the pantry,
the servants' hall, and so on. Rupert flung open all the doors with
indescribable rapidity. Four out of the five opened on entirely empty
apartments. The fifth was locked. Rupert broke the door in like a
bandbox, and we fell into the sudden blackness of the sealed, unlighted
room.

Rupert stood on the threshold, and called out like a man calling into an
abyss:

"Whoever you are, come out. You are free. The people who held you
captive are captives themselves. We heard you crying and we came to
deliver you. We have bound your enemies upstairs hand and foot. You are
free."

For some seconds after he had spoken into the darkness there was a dead
silence in it. Then there came a kind of muttering and moaning. We might
easily have taken it for the wind or rats if we had not happened to have
heard it before. It was unmistakably the voice of the imprisoned woman,
drearily demanding liberty, just as we had heard her demand it.

"Has anybody got a match?" said Rupert grimly. "I fancy we have come
pretty near the end of this business."

I struck a match and held it up. It revealed a large, bare,
yellow-papered apartment with a dark-clad figure at the other end of
it near the window. An instant after it burned my fingers and dropped,
leaving darkness. It had, however, revealed something more practical--an
iron gas bracket just above my head. I struck another match and lit the
gas. And we found ourselves suddenly and seriously in the presence of
the captive.

At a sort of workbox in the window of this subterranean breakfast-room
sat an elderly lady with a singularly high colour and almost startling
silver hair. She had, as if designedly to relieve these effects, a pair
of Mephistophelian black eyebrows and a very neat black dress. The glare
of the gas lit up her piquant hair and face perfectly against the brown
background of the shutters. The background was blue and not brown in one
place; at the place where Rupert's knife had torn a great opening in the
wood about an hour before.

"Madam," said he, advancing with a gesture of the hat, "permit me
to have the pleasure of announcing to you that you are free. Your
complaints happened to strike our ears as we passed down the street,