The night itself aided him even as he drew back against the wall, for now the darkness was profound and, also, the rain beat down pitilessly on the great window; while the wind, risen once more, was again howling round the Weiss Haus. But ever still he heard--or did he feel?--that footfall drawing stealthily nearer and nearer to him.
At last Bevill heard something also--something he could not understand, something the meaning of which he could in no wise comprehend.
He heard a sliding noise upon the wall in a line with the spot where his face reached, and he fancied that it was varied now and again by something else which sounded like the light touch of fingers tapping on that wall.
"Whoe'er it is," he said to himself, suddenly recognising what that scraping sound, interrupted by an occasional touch on the wall, was, "he feels his way carefully. Let me be ready to greet him--ah!" he ejaculated, lunging out straight before him with his sword, though piercing nothing. "Ah!"
Fingers had passed across his face: an instant later something long and hairy had swept across his left hand, even as he lunged with his right: still a moment later the sound of a figure springing down the wide staircase fell on his ears; and, ere another moment had elapsed, he was springing after it.
But, even as he did go, he muttered to himself:
"This is not Francbois! He had no beard. Who, then, is it? Ah! Sparmann perchance!"
Some hours after the morning had broken grey and desolate, but with still a promise in the heavens that the storms of the night were past, Bevill Bracton arose from the great lounge in the hall on which he had laid himself down and on which he had been enabled to snatch some broken rest. For it was six o'clock ere he had deemed it prudent to attempt this, and he had not even then done so until he had satisfied himself that, whosoever the man might be whose hand had passed across his face and whose beard had swept over his disengaged hand, he was not present in the house now.
While, however, discovering this to be the case, he had made discovery of something else. He had found signs that this man had not been the only visitor to the Weiss Haus beside himself, but that there had been another. Also, he had arrived at the conclusion that each of the men had come here on some secret purpose unknown to the other, and that they had met in the dark and had fought with each other. What that purpose was might not be hard to discover, he thought, yet, even so, he could not resolve why, if both of these intruders were his enemies, they should have come into deadly contact with each other. But that this had been the case there was no room left for doubt.