WITHIN thirty minutes after Ackerman had received Stella's message that she had found the secret entrance to the house he was waiting for her at the door of the vault as she had suggested.
He had entered by the rear wagon road and passed into the shrubbery without attracting the attention of the servants.
She showed him the way to the underground passage through the niche in the rear of the vault, and in ten minutes Ackerman entered the hall through the panel under the stairs.
Stella, who had returned to the house across the lawn, watched the panel slowly open at his touch and her eyes gleamed with a cold, hard light as she saw reënacted in imagination the tragedy of her father's death.
The detective made an accurate diagram of the hall, measured carefully the distance of the secret door from the chair in which the Judge had been found, and reëxamined the ballroom and all its possible exits and entrances.
