It was after two o’clock in the afternoon when he awoke. He must have slept three hours. He looked at the sofa and saw the girl still sleeping peacefully. He almost wished that she would never awake to all the dreadful surprises that the house held for her. Her eye-lashes curved long and dark on her cheek. Geoffrey turned away quickly.

He had awakened with a sudden disagreeable conviction that people have been known to smother to death in closets. He stole quietly from the library and ran up stairs with not a little anxiety. Indeed so great was his dread that he would have been really relieved to see the closet door standing open as an immediate proof that it did not hide a corpse. It was, however, locked as he had left it. But as he hastened to undo it, a voice from within reassured him:

“Well, where have you been all this time?”

“You may be thankful I’m back at all. It did not look like it, at one time.”

“Where is Cecilia?”

“Down stairs asleep.”

McVay gave a little giggle. “Ah,” he said, “I bet you have had the devil of a time. I bet you wished once or twice that you had let me be the one to go.”

“It wasn’t child’s play.”

“Child’s play! I rather think not. These things are all well enough among men, but women!” he waved his hand; “so sensitive, so cloistered!”

“Your sister behaved nobly,” said Geoffrey severely.

“Bound to, Holland, bound to. Still it must have been a shock.”

“It was a hard trip for any woman.”

McVay looked up. “Oh,” he said, “I wasn’t speaking of the trip. I meant about me. What did she say?”

“She did not say anything. She went to sleep.”

“She did not say anything when you told her I was booked for the penitentiary?”

“Oh,” said Geoffrey, and there was a slight pause. Then he added: “Why should I tell her what she must know.”

“I tell you she knows nothing about my—profession.”

“Your profession!”

“Hasn’t a notion of it.”

“What, with my sister’s coat on her back, and the Innes’ bag in her hand?”

“No!” McVay drew a step nearer. “You see I told her that I had found a second-hand store where I could get things for nothing.” He chuckled, and Geoffrey withdrew with a look of repulsion that evidently disappointed the other.

“That was a good idea, wasn’t it?” he asked with a faint appeal in his voice. “She thought it was likely, anyhow.”

“She must be very gullable,” said Geoffrey brutally.

“Or else,” said McVay with a conscious smile, “I must be a pretty good dissembler.”

At this acute instance of fatuity Geoffrey, if he had followed his impulse, would have flung McVay back in the closet and locked the door. Instead, he said:

“Come down stairs. I want to look up something to eat.”

“Thank you,” said the burglar, “it would be a good idea.”

“You need not thank me,” said Geoffrey. “I don’t take you with me for the pleasure of your company, but because I don’t dare let you out of my sight.”

McVay, as was his habit when anything unpleasant was said, chose to ignore this speech.

“You know,” he said, as they went down stairs, “I suppose that most men shut up in a closet for all those hours would take it as a hardship, but, to me it was a positive rest. I really in a way enjoyed it. It is one of my theories that every one ought to have resources within. Now I dare say you were quite anxious about me.”

“I never thought of you at all,” said Geoffrey. “After I got in I went to sleep for three hours.”

McVay looked at him once or twice, in surprise. Then he said with dignity: “Asleep? Well, really, Holland, I don’t think that was very considerate.”

“Don’t talk so loud,” said Geoffrey, “you’ll wake your sister.”

Geoffrey had always been in the habit of going on shooting trips at short notice, and so it was his rule to keep a supply of canned eatables in the house to be ready whenever the whim took him. On these he now depended, and was not a little annoyed to find the kitchen store room where they were kept securely locked.

This difficulty, however, McVay made light of. He asked for his tools and on being given them set to work on the door.

“Have you ever noticed,” he said, “the heavy handed way in which some men use tools? Look at my touch,—so light, yet so accurate. I take no credit to myself. I was born so. It’s a very fortunate thing to be naturally dexterous.”

“It would have been more fortunate for you if you had been a little less so.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that, Holland. I might have starved to death years ago.”

“I wish to God you had,” said Geoffrey.

McVay shook his head faintly in deprecation of such violence, but otherwise preferred to pass the remark by, and they soon set to work heating soup and smoked beef. When all was ready and spread in the dining-room—this was McVay’s suggestion; he said food was unappetising unless it were nicely served—Geoffrey said:

“Go and see if your sister is awake, and if she is,” he added firmly, “I’ll give you a few minutes alone with her, so that you can explain the situation fully.”

McVay nodded and slipped into the library. Geoffrey shut the door behind him, and sat down on a bench in the hall from which he could command both doors.

If he entertained the doubts of her innocence which he continually told himself no sane man could help entertaining, he found himself strangely nervous. He felt as if he were waiting outside an operating room. He thought of her as he had seen her asleep, of the curve of her eye-lashes on her cheek, of her raising those lashes, awaking to be met with McVay’s revelations. Even if she were guilty, Geoffrey found it in his heart to pity her waking to learn that her brother was a prisoner. How unfortunate, too, would be her own position,—the guest, if only for a few hours, of a man who was concerned only to lodge her brother in jail.

His heart gave a distinct thump when the library door opened and they came out together. His eyes turned to her face at once, and found it unperturbed. Didn’t she care, or had she always known?

McVay caught his arm when she had passed them by, and whispered glibly:

“Thought it was better to wait until she had had something to eat—shock on an empty stomach, so bad—so hard to bear.”

Geoffrey shook his arm free. “You infernal coward,” he whispered back.

“Well, I like that,” retorted McVay, “you didn’t tell her yourself when you had the chance.”

“It wasn’t my affair. I did not tell her because—”

“Oh, I know,” McVay interrupted with a chuckle. “I’ve been knowing why for the last ten minutes.”

They followed her into the dining-room.

It was not a sumptuous repast to which they sat down, but Geoffrey asked nothing better. He was sitting opposite to her,—a position evidently decreed him by Fate from the beginning of time. He could look at her, and now and then, in spite of her delicious reluctance, could force her to meet his eyes. When this happened, nothing was ever more apparent than that, for both of them, a momentous event had occurred.

She was almost completely silent, and as for him, his responses to the general conversation which McVay kept attempting to set up, were so entirely mechanical that he was scarcely aware of them himself.

It was she who suddenly remembered that it was Christmas day.

“And this is our Christmas dinner,” observed McVay regretfully.

“Oh, no,” returned the girl, “this is luncheon. I’ll cook your dinner. You’ll see.”

There was a pause. Geoffrey looked at McVay. The moment for disillusioning her had manifestly come. Wherever they might next meet it would not be at his dinner table. A hateful vision of a criminal court rose before him.

“Miss McVay,” he said gravely, indifferent to the signals of warning which the other man was directing toward him; “we shall not be here at dinner. Your brother will tell you my reasons for wishing to start down the mountain.”

“Now?”

“At once.”

She coloured slowly and deeply,—the only evidence of anger. “I do not need any other reason than your wish that we should go,” she said, rising. “I should thank you for having borne with us so long.”

“Upon my word, Holland, it is madness to start as late as this,” said McVay. “It will be dark in an hour.”

She turned on her brother quickly: “Please say no more about the matter, Billy,” she said. “We will start at once.”

“You won’t start if it means certainly freezing to death,” he remonstrated.

She flashed a glance at Geoffrey, who had also risen and was trying to compel the truth from McVay by a stern, steady glance.

“I would,” she answered and shut the door behind her.

McVay sprang up and was about to follow her when Geoffrey stopped him. “One moment,” he said, “you are quite right. It is too late to start to-night. We must stay here until to-morrow. But if we are to spend a night here without your sister’s being told—”

“My dear Holland, think of her position, if we did tell her!”

“I grant that the information had better be withheld until just as we are starting, but in that case I must—”

“I know what you are going to ask,—my word of honour not to escape. I give it, I give it willingly.”

“I’m not going to ask for anything at all,” said Geoffrey. “I’m going to tell you one or two things, and I advise you to pay attention. We won’t have any nonsense at all. Remember I am armed, and I am a quick man with a gun. There may be some quicker, but not in the East, and it wasn’t in the East I got my training. You will always keep in front of me where I can see you plainly, and you will never, under any circumstances come nearer than six feet to me. If you should ever come nearer than that or take a sudden step in my direction, I’d shoot you just as sure as I stand here.”

McVay looked distinctly crestfallen. “Oh, come, Holland,” he said, “isn’t that the least little bit exaggerated? You would not shoot me before my own sister?”

“I would not like to, but there are things I should dislike even more, and having you escape is one of them.”

The other thought it over. “The trouble is,” he explained, “that I am impulsive. You must have noticed it. I get carried away. You know how I am. I’m not at all sure that I shall remember.”

“I advise you to try, for this is the only warning you will get.”

“I cannot believe, Holland, that you would really shoot me in cold blood in the presence of my own sister.”

“You had better behave as if you believed it.”

“I don’t like this arrangement,” McVay broke out peevishly. “Suppose, for the sake of argument, that I did forget,—that I put my hand on your shoulder—a very natural gesture.”

“I should shoot instantly.”

“But fancy the shock to Cecilia.”

“Not more of a shock, perhaps, than discovering that you are a thief. And another thing, it may be very gay and amusing to be forever fooling about the subject, but I advise you against it. It does not amuse me.”

“Oh, be honest, Holland, it does, it must amuse you. It is essentially amusing.”

“It won’t amuse her, or you either when she finds out that you are not only a thief but that you have been able to find amusement in deceiving her.”

Again McVay’s gaiety seemed momentarily dashed. “Very true,” he said, “I had not thought of that. But then,” he added more brightly, “who can tell if it will actually fall to my lot to tell her. Things happen so strangely. It may turn out that that is your part.”

“It may,” said Geoffrey, “but only because I have had to shoot after all.” With which he opened the door and they returned to the library.