And the realisation that at once came to him with a touch of dismay was, that during his sleep some definite change had been effected in the room.  He felt this with that intuitive certainty which amounts to positive knowledge.  The room was utterly still, but the corroboration that was speedily brought to him seemed at once to fill the darkness with a whispering, secret life that chilled his blood and made the sheet feel like ice against his cheek.

Hark!  This was it; there reached his ears, in which the blood was already buzzing with warning clamour, a dull murmur of something that rose indistinctly from the well of the house and became audible to him without passing through walls or doors.  There seemed no solid surface between him, lying on the bed, and the landing; between the landing and the stairs, and between the stairs and the hall beyond.

He knew that the door of the room was standing open!  Therefore it had been opened from the inside.  Yet the window was fastened, also on the inside.

Hardly was this realised when the conspiring silence of the hour was broken by another and a more definite sound.  A step was coming along the passage.  A certain bruise on the hip told Shorthouse that the pistol in his pocket was ready for use and he drew it out quickly and cocked it.  Then he just had time to slip over the edge of the bed and crouch down on the floor when the step halted on the threshold of the room.  The bed was thus between him and the open door.  The window was at his back.

He waited in the darkness.  What struck him as peculiar about the steps was that there seemed no particular desire to move stealthily.  There was no extreme caution.  They moved along in rather a slipshod way and sounded like soft slippers or feet in stockings.  There was something clumsy, irresponsible, almost reckless about the movement.

For a second the steps paused upon the threshold, but only for a second.  Almost immediately they came on into the room, and as they passed from the wood to the carpet Shorthouse noticed that they became wholly noiseless.  He waited in suspense, not knowing whether the unseen walker was on the other side of the room or was close upon him.  Presently he stood up and stretched out his left arm in front of him, groping, searching, feeling in a circle; and behind it he held the pistol, cocked and pointed, in his right hand.  As he rose a bone cracked in his knee, his clothes rustled as if they were newspapers, and his breath seemed loud enough to be heard all over the room.  But not a sound came to betray the position of the invisible intruder.

Then, just when the tension was becoming unbearable, a noise relieved the gripping silence.  It was wood knocking against wood, and it came from the farther end of the room.  The steps had moved over to the fireplace.  A sliding sound almost immediately followed it and then silence closed again over everything like a pall.