I rapped on the panel and listened. No sound rewarded me. I rapped
again more vigorously, but only silence followed. The house might have
been the grave for all the signs of life it gave back.

There was something ominous about it. To be locked, thus, in a dark
room of this house in which I had already been attacked, was enough to
shake my spirit and resolution for the moment. What lay without the
door, my apprehension asked me. Was it part of the plot to get the
secret it was supposed I held? Had Mother Borton been murdered, and the
house seized? Or had Mother Borton played me false, and was I now a
prisoner to my own party for my enforced imposture, as one who knew too
much to be left at large and too little to be of use? On a second and
calmer thought it was evidently folly to bring my jailers about my
ears, if jailers there were. I abandoned my half-formed plan of
breaking down the door, and turned to the window and the light-well.
Another window faced on the same space, not five feet away. If it were
but opened I might swing myself over and through it; but it was closed,
and a curtain hid the unknown possibilities and dangers of the
interior. A dozen feet above was the roof, with no projection or
foothold by which it might be reached. Below, the light-well ended in a
tinned floor, about four feet from the window sill.

I swung myself down, and with two steps was trying the other window. It
was unlocked. I raised the sash cautiously, but its creaking protest
seemed to my excited ears to be loud enough to wake any but the dead. I
stopped and listened after each squeak of the frame. There was no sign
of movement.

Then I pushed aside the curtain cautiously, and looked within. The room