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132 prettily papered wall framed in the lace of half-drawn curtains. Something moved within the room, but beyond the range of his vision; he saw an indefinite shadow flicker across the wall, but more than that, nothing.

Behind him, grim, ravening death stalked Alan in the darkness. He had not the least suspicion that all was not well.

Of a sudden, the tenant of the room came to the window and stood there looking pensively out, altogether unconscious of the watcher. Was the woman Rose or Judith? That she was one of those he could plainly see. At last she revealed herself by a gesture indelibly stamped on tablets of his memory: a slight gesture of grave dubiety, fingertips lightly touching her lips and cheek. The woman in the window, then, was Rose.

He drew from his pocket a notebook, tore out a blank page, and with the assistance of a ray of moonlight, scrawled a message.

When he looked up from this task, she had vanished. Sitting astride the girder, he took his watch—a cheap affair he had picked up when reclothing himself in the garments of civilized society at Providence that morning—opened the back of the case, and closed it upon the folded message. Then drawing back his arm, he cast it from him with such force