The Coldstone by Patricia Wentworth

and slid without any sound over the smooth panels. The door-post was rougher. His hand slipped downwards, groped for the handle, and closed upon it gently. For a long minute he was turning it. Then when the latch was free, he pushed the door a bare half inch and slowly released the catch again.
    There had been a light in the room, but there was no light there now; the half-inch opening was as impenetrable as the door. He made the opening wider, and then wider again, until the door, opening inwards, stood at a right angle with the wall. This brought him into the room. He stood just over the threshold, listening, his hand on the torch in his pocket.
    The room was profoundly still and most profoundly dark. It smelt faintly of beeswax and turpentine, and of all the old books which lined its walls. But Anthony had no sooner stepped into it than he was aware of something more than the night, and the silence, and the ghosts of dead books.
    He took the torch out of his pocket, and was as sure as he had ever been of anything in his life that there was someone else in the room, someone standing still with caught breath, or moving and breathing with as little sound as he himself had made. He had his finger on the switch of the torch, he had even begun to move it, when he heard a sound. From the moment that he had waked until now everything had passed in dumb show; he had not even heard his own movements; the action had been like the action of a dream. This was the first sound, and it came, not from this room in which he discerned a presence, but from the passage behind him.
    In an instant he had stepped sideways, clear of the doorway; and as he did so, he heard the sound again. Someone was moving in the hall. The sound that he had heard was the sound of a cautiously planted foot. Someone was undoubtedly coming down the passage towards the library door. And then, as he stood there straining his ears, there was a faint click on his left and the beam of a torch cut the darkness. A man was standing on the threshold.
    Anthony saw three things almost simultaneously. He was standing in the corner of the room about six feet from the door, and at the sound of the click he looked instinctively in the direction from which it came, and he saw three things. First, very dimly, the outline of a man holding out a torch in front of him. Then the long ray, stabbing the darkness as it turned here and there. And lastly the portrait of Miss Patience Pleydell. It hung low on the left-hand wall, where a strip of panelling divided one book-filled space from another. He had noticed only that afternoon how cleverly the painting had been sunk into the panel so as to give the effect of a person standing against the wall. The ray came to rest upon the portrait, and Anthony could have cried out, so lifelike did it seem.
    Next moment someone did cry out. The girl in the flowered dress and blue petticoat moved visibly, or seemed to move, as the beam dipped and came to rest on her again. Anthony could have sworn that she moved. And at the same time someone gave a little choking cry, and this cry came from somewhere quite close at hand; he thought from behind the open door.
    Miss Patience Pleydell moved her arm, someone cried out, the light went out with a click, and Anthony jumped for the man with the torch—jumped, touched a rough sleeve, made a grab in the dark, dropped his own torch, which he had forgotten, and, to the sound of another little gasping cry, grappled with someone quite extraordinarily hard and lithe. He got hold of a coat-collar, heard something rip, and received a bang on the side of the head from the intruder’s torch. At the same time the collar was twisted out of his hand and its owner took to his heels. Anthony slipped and came down sprawling. He scrambled up to sounds of flight. He thought he could hear more than one man running away. A door banged. He had fallen on his torch. By the time that he was up and had switched it on, the passage