I mounted softly, but the stairs creaked in a horrible fashion, so that I became hotly apprehensive before I gained the top.  I had nothing to fear, however, for again empty rooms alone rewarded my search.  My most significant discovery in the upper part of the house was that of a bedroom which was still almost completely furnished and in which even the bed-linen yet remained untidily strewn about the bed.  But there were thick spiders’ webs stretching from the coverlet to the canopy, and a coating of dust lay everywhere.

When I finally returned to the empty drawing-room, I had convinced myself of that which I had come to seek.

Friar’s Park was uninhabited!

CHAPTER XIX

THE MAN ON THE TOWER

I quitted Friar’s Park unobserved—­as I had entered it; walking quickly across to the shrubbery, I began to work my way back to the point at which I must strike westward in order to reach the weed-grown kitchen-garden.  At the risk of encountering man-traps I gave the lodge a wide berth and came out in sight of the wall at a point much nearer the lawns of the house than that from which I had entered.

What it was that prompted me to turn and take a final look at the house I cannot say, but before commencing to make my way through the wilderness of the kitchen-garden, I know that I stood and looked back towards the ancient Saxon tower which uprose, silvered by the moonlight, above the trees that obscured from my view all the rest of the house.

Right to the embrasured crest it was sharply outlined by the brilliant moon—­and as I looked I felt my heart leap suddenly; and then, almost holding my breath, I crouched, distrusting the very shadows which afforded me shelter.

For leaning out through one of the embrasures at the top of the tower, I clearly saw the figure of a man!

At first so whitely was his face lighted up by the moon that I had no doubt of the figure being that of a man, but he remained so still, seeming always to look in a fixed way in the same direction, that now, momentarily I doubted, until a slight movement betrayed the fact that my first impression had been correct.

Who he was I could not possibly tell from that distance, but of his occupation I became assured at the moment that he moved; for the moonlight glittered brightly on the lenses of the binoculars through which he had been surveying some point visible only from that elevation.

Still I watched, and again I saw the man of the tower raise his glasses and resume his scrutiny of that distant object which so closely engaged his attention.  Remembering that a patch of light touched the top of the wall, spearlike, at the point where I must cross it in order to reach the fir tree, I abandoned my former precautions and hurried through the tangled weeds towards the fir which was my sailing mark.

Hastily I scrambled up the natural ladder formed by the vine, and without pause climbed down again to the edge of the dry ditch beyond.  To have looked back over the wall would have been useless, since from that point the tower would have been invisible.  Nor indeed had I any desire to pause in my precarious journey.