He sat on the edge of his bed, wrapped in a bathrobe, and pondered.
Stroke by stroke he built the picture of that dead mother, like a
painter who jots down the first sketch of a large composition. John
Woodbury, vast, blond, grey-eyed, had given him few of his physical
traits. But then he had often heard that the son usually resembled the
mother. She must have been dark, slender, a frail wife for such a giant;
but perhaps she had a strength of spirit which made her his mate.

As the picture drew out more clearly in the mind of Anthony, he turned
from the lighted room, threw open a window, and leaned out to breathe
the calm, damp air of night.

It was infinitely cool, infinitely fresh. To his left a row of young
trees darted their slender tops at the sky like shadowy spearheads. The
smell of wet leaves and the wet grass beneath rose up to him. To the
right, for his own room stood in a wing of the mansion, the house
shouldered its way into the gloom, a solemn, grey shadow, netted in a
black tracery of climbing vine. In all the stretch of wall only two
windows were lighted, and those yellow squares, he knew, belonged to his
father. He had left the secret room, therefore.

As he watched, a shadow brushed slowly across one of the drawn shades,
swept the second, and returned at once in the opposite direction. Back
and forth, back and forth, that shadow moved, and as his eye grew
accustomed to watching, he caught quite clearly the curve of the
shoulders and the forward droop of the head.

It was not until then that the first alarm came to Anthony, for he knew
that the footsteps of the big grey man were dogged by fear. He could no