Page:While Caroline Was Growing.djvu/137

 throat. With her hand on the swing door that led into the dining-room, she paused in a delicious ecstasy of terror, as the imagined clink of glass and silver, the normal clatter of a cheerful meal, seemed to echo in the air.

It was always difficult for Caroline in such moments of excitement to distinguish between what she saw and heard and what she wished to see and hear, and at this ghost of table music she smiled with pleasure.

"The house is empty," said her common-sense, but she pursed her lips and whispered, "they're up here eating—they've come for the silver!"

By fractions of inches she pushed the door on its well-oiled hinge and slipped noiselessly into the dining-room.

A broad beam of light fell across the dark, wainscoted room, and in the track of it sat a handsome well-dressed man, busily eating. In front of him was a roast chicken, a cut-glass dish of celery and a ruby mound of jelly; a crusty loaf of new bread lay broken at his right; at his left, winking in the sunbeam, stood a decanter half filled with a topaz liquor. He was daintily