more severely than the tumult of their first attack on the
cottage.

Dreadful suspicions now beset me of their being able to
accomplish by treachery what they had failed to effect by force.
Well as I knew the cottage, I began to doubt whether there might
not be ways of cunningly and silently entering it against which I
was not provided. The ticking of the clock annoyed me; the
crackling of the fire startled me. I looked out twenty times in a
minute into the dark corners of the passage, straining my eyes,
holding my breath, anticipating the most unlikely events, the
most impossible dangers. Had they really gone, or were they still
prowling about the house? Oh, what a sum of money I would have
given only to have known what they were about in that interval of
silence!

I was startled at last out of my suspense in the most awful
manner. A shout from one of them reached my ears on a sudden down
the kitchen chimney. It was so unexpected and so horrible in the
stillness that I screamed for the first time since the attack on
the house. My worst forebodings had never suggested to me that
the two villains might mount upon the roof.

"Let us in, you she-devil!" roared a voice down the chimney.

There was another pause. The smoke from the wood fire, thin and
light as it was in the red state of the embers at that moment,
had evidently obliged the man to take his face from the mouth of
the chimney. I counted the seconds while he was, as I
conjectured, getting his breath again. In less than half a minute