profitless to the robber's greed. There, through the very halls which
the master had built in the day of his ambition, saying to himself,
"These are for far posterity," the step of Violence, it may be of Murder,
takes its stealthy way to the room of the childless man! Through the
uncompleted pile, towards the uncompleted life, strides the terrible
step.

The last door yields noiselessly. The small wooden corridor, narrow as
the drawbridge which in ancient fortresses was swung between the
commandant's room in the topmost story and some opposing wall, is before
him. And Darrell's own door is half open; lights on the table--logs
burning bright on the hearth. Cautiously Losely looked through the
aperture. Darrell was not there; the place was solitary; but the
opposite door was open also. Losely's fine ear caught the sound of a
slight movement of a footstep in the room just below, to which that
opposite door admitted. In an instant the robber glided within the
chamber--closed and locked the door by which he had entered, retaining
the key about his person. The next stride brought him to the hearth.
Beside it hung the bell-rope common in old-fashioned houses. Losely
looked round; on the table, by the writing implements, lay a pen-knife.
In another moment the rope was cut, high out of Darrell's reach, and
flung aside. The hearth, being adapted but for logwood fires, furnished
not those implements in which, at a moment of need, the owner may find an
available weapon--only a slight pair of brass wood-pincers, and a shovel
equally frail. Such as they were, however, Jasper quietly removed and
hid them behind a heavy old bureau. Steps were now heard mounting the
stair that led into the chamber; Losely shrunk back into the recess
beside the mantelpiece. Darrell entered, with a book in his hand, for
which he had indeed quitted his chamber--a volume containing the last Act
of Parliament relating to Public Trusts, which had been sent to him by