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72 the sort of organ that can be played either with fingers or by means of a paper roll; a book of music had fallen upon the keys, so that one was pressed down, causing the note to sound when the bellows pumped.

But having accounted for the sound did not immediately end the start that it had given Alan. He had the feeling which so often comes to one in an unfamiliar and vacant house that there was some one in the house with him. He listened and seemed to hear another sound in the upper hall, a footstep. He went out quickly to the foot of the stairs and looked up them.

"Is any one here?" he called. "Is any one here?"

His voice brought no response. He went half way up the curve of the wide stairway, and called again, and listened; then he fought down the feeling he had had; Sherrill had said there would be no one in the house, and Alan was certain there was no one. So he went back to the room where he had left the light.

The center of this room, like the room next to it, was occupied by a library table-desk. He pulled open some of the drawers in it; one or two had blue prints and technical drawings in them; the others had only the miscellany which accumulates in a room much used. There were drawers also under the bookcases all around the room; they appeared, when Alan opened some of them, to contain pamphlets of various societies, and the scientific correspondence of which Sherrill had told him. He looked over the titles of some of the books on the shelves—a multitude of subjects, anthropology, exploration, deep-sea fishing, ship-building, astronomy. The books in each section of the shelves seemed to correspond in subject with the pamphlets and correspondence in the drawer beneath, and these, by their dates, to