e rooms. Nonsense! Why should you make excuses to _me_? Don't I
know how easily trifles upset those excitable nerves of yours? Now the
doctor has quieted my mind about my poor little Neelie, I begin to
feel the journey; and I'll answer for sleeping anywhere till to-morrow
comes." He took up his traveling-bag. "We must be quick about it," he
added, pointing to his candle. "They haven't left me much candle to go
to bed by."

"Be very quiet, Allan," said Midwinter, opening the door for him. "We
mustn't disturb the house at this time of night."

"Yes, yes," returned Allan, in a whisper. "Good-night; I hope you'll
sleep as well as I shall."

Midwinter saw him into Number Three, and noticed that his own candle
(which he had left there) was as short as Allan's. "Good-night," he
said, and came out again into the corridor.

He went straight to the grating, and looked and listened once more. The
handkerchief remained exactly as he had left it, and still there was
no sound to be heard within. He returned slowly along the corridor, and
thought of the precautions he had taken, for the last time. Was there
no other way than the way he was trying now? There was none. Any openly
avowed posture of defense--while the nature of the danger, and the
quarter from which it might come, were alike unknown--would be useless
in itself, and worse than useless in the consequences which it might
produce by putting the people of the house on their guard. Without a
fact that could justify to other minds his distrust of what might happen
with the night, incapable of shaking Allan's ready faith in the fair
outside which the doctor had presented to him, the one safeguard in
his friend's interests that Midwinter could set up was the safeguard of
changing the rooms--the one policy he could follow, come what might of
it, was the policy of waiting for events. "I can trust to one thing,"
he said to himself, as he looked for the last time up and down the
corridor--"I can trust myself to keep awake."

After a glance at the clock on the wall opposite, he went into Number
Four. The sound of the closing door was heard, the sound of the turning
lock followed it. Then the dead silence fell over the house once more.

Little by little, the steward's horror of the stillness and the darkness
overcame his dread of moving the handkerchief. He cautiously drew aside
one corner of it, waited, looked, and took courage at last to draw the
whole handkerchief through the w