As she stared, incredulous at first, then driven to believe, Angela guessed how the seeming miracle had been performed.  The man had crept along the cornice which belted the wall, on a level a few feet lower than the line of the window-sills.  She remembered noticing this as one suddenly recalls some forgotten detail in a photograph.  A clever thief might make the perilous passage, helping himself along by one window-sill after another until he reached the one he wanted.

Angela turned sick, her first thought being of the immense drop from her window to the ground.  “If he should fall!” were the words that sprang to her lips.  Then she remembered that it would be better for her if he should fall.  He meant to rob and perhaps to murder her.  She ought to wish that he might slip.  But she seemed to hear a crash, to see a sight of horror, and could not make the wish.

She lay motionless, her thoughts confused by the knocking of her heart.  If she jumped out of bed and ran across the room to the telephone, the man could see her.  Then, knowing that she was awake, and caution on his part unnecessary, he would fling up the window, jump in, and choke her into silence.

“What can I do?” she asked herself.  In two or three minutes more the slow, stealthy lifting of the window-sash would be finished, and the thief would be in the room.

Her rings, and her gold bag with a good deal of money in it, lay on the dressing-table.  If only he would be satisfied with these, she might lie still and let him act; but her watch was under the pillow, and her pearls were round her throat.  The pearls were worth far more than the bag, and the black shadow out there must know that she had many things worth taking, or it would not be at her window now.

“What can I do?”

Suddenly she thought of a thing she could do; and without stopping to ask whether there were something else better, she leaned out of bed and knocked on the door between her room and the next.  The door was fastened, but, rapping with one hand, with the other she slipped back the bolt.  “Quick—­quick—­help!” she called.  “A thief is getting in at my window.”

There was a faint click, the switching on of electric light, the swift pushing back of a bolt, and the door flew open.  The shoes she had seen in the hall had told her the truth.  It was the man she expected who stood for the fifth part of a second in the doorway of her darkened room, then, lithe and noiseless as an Indian, made for the window.  The thief was taken completely by surprise.  When Angela suddenly cried out, he had been in the act of letting himself down to the floor, by slipping under the window-sash, raised just high enough for him to squeeze through.  He had half turned on the wide ledge, so as to get his legs through first and land on his knees; therefore, he was seized at a disadvantage.  The most agile gymnast could not have pulled himself back from under the window-frame, balanced his body steadily again on the stone ledge outside, and have begun to crawl away toward safety, all in those few seconds before the cry and its answer.  He did his snaky, practised best, but it was not quite good enough.  The man from the next room was too quick for him, and he was caught like a rat in a trap.