The boy's breath came hot into his throat and stuck there, and his heart
beat like a high, unresting hammer.

Mrs. Carter, with the candle raised to throw light in front of her,
moved forward very cautiously and softly. She passed down the passage,
and then paused very near to the boy. She looked at the keys, and stole
like some heavy, stealthy animal to the door of the long drawing-room.
He watched her as she tried one key after another, making little
dissatisfied noises as they refused to fit; then at last one turned the
lock and she pushed back the door.

It was certainly impossible for him, in the dim world of his mind, to
realise what it was that she intended to do, but he knew, through some
strange channel of knowledge, that his mother was concerned in this, and
that something more than the immediate peril of himself was involved.
He had also, lost in the dim mazes of his mind, a consciousness that
there _were_ treasures in the house, and that his mother was placed
there to guard them, and even that he himself shared her duty.

It did not come to him that Mrs. Carter was in pursuit of these
treasures, but he _did_ realise that her presence there amongst them
brought peril to his mother. Moved then by some desperate urgency which
had at its heart his sense that to be left alone in the black passage
was worse than the actual lighted vision of his Terror, he crept with
trembling knees across the passage and through the door.

Inside the room he saw that she had laid the candle upon the piano, and
was bending over a drawer, trying again to fit a key. He stood in the
doorway, a tiny figure, very, very cold, all his soul in his silent