soul away. A hostile witness--not to be treated as hostile--a matter for
delicate handling! But his knock was not answered.

Should he give up this nerve-racking, bizarre effort to come at a basis
of judgment; go away, and just tell Laurence that he could not advise
him? And then--what? Something must be done. He knocked again. Still no
answer. And with that impatience of being thwarted, natural to him, and
fostered to the full by the conditions of his life, he tried the other
key. It worked, and he opened the door. Inside all was dark, but a
voice from some way off, with a sort of breathless relief in its foreign
tones, said:

"Oh! then it's you, Larry! Why did you knock? I was so frightened. Turn
up the light, dear. Come in!"

Feeling by the door for a switch in the pitch blackness he was conscious
of arms round his neck, a warm thinly clad body pressed to his own; then
withdrawn as quickly, with a gasp, and the most awful terror-stricken
whisper:

"Oh! Who is it?"

With a glacial shiver down his own spine, Keith answered

"A friend of Laurence. Don't be frightened!"

There was such silence that he could hear a clock ticking, and the sound
of his own hand passing over the surface of the wall, trying to find the
switch. He found it, and in the light which leaped up he saw, stiffened
against a dark curtain evidently screening off a bedroom, a girl