like pain. He wished his dead mother might have looked like her. He was glad—because there was the suggestion of tears in his feelings—when she went into the white bedroom and closed the door. Then he rushed out silently toward the stairs.
He was planning his escape as he cautiously descended them peering down and looking for the men. The servants on the lower floor, he realized, had been disturbed; it was not probable that he could get out of the house by the way he had come in without being seen and caught. The alternative that remained was to get out at the great front door.
He could see nothing of the men. The door of one of the rooms which had been open when he had ascended the stairs was now closed. The men unquestionably had gone in there. He passed this door on tip-toe and had nearly reached the comparative safety of the vestibule when the voice of the deeper toned of the two men, reaching him through the closed door, caught and halted him and whirled him suddenly about:
