ossessed
me so completely that, when he fell asleep one evening on the library
lounge, I took the opportunity of stealing away and mounting the
forbidden staircase to the third floor. I had found a candle in my
bedroom, and this I took to light me. But it revealed nothing to me
except a double row of unused rooms, with dust on the handles of all the
doors. I scrutinized them all; for, young as I was, I had wit enough to
see that if I could find one knob on which no dust lay that would be the
one my husband was accustomed to turn. But every one showed tokens of
not having been touched in years, and, baffled in my search, I was about
to retreat, when I remembered that the house had four stories, and
that I had not yet come upon the staircase leading to the one above.
A hurried search (for I was mortally afraid of being surprised by my
husband,) revealed to me at last a distant door, which had no dust on
its knob. It lay at the bottom of a shut-in stair-case, and, convinced
that here was, the place my husband was in the habit of visiting, I
carefully fingered the knob, which turned very softly in my hand. But
it did not open the door. There was a lock visible just below, and that
lock was fastened.

My first escapade was without visible results, but I was uneasy from
that hour. I imagined all sorts of things hidden beyond that closed,
door. I remembered that the windows of the fourth story were all boarded
up, and asked myself why this had been done when the lower ones had been
left open. I was young, but I had heard of occupations which could only
be entered into by a man secretly. Did he amuse himself with forbidden
tasks in that secluded place above, or was I but exaggerating facts
which might have their basis simply in a quondam bachelor's desire for
solitude and a quiet smoke. "I will follow him up some night," thought
I, "and see if I cannot put an end at once to my unworthy fears and
unhappy suspicions." But I never did; something happened very soon to
prevent me.

I was walking one morning in the grounds that lay about the house, when
suddenly I felt something small but perceptibly hard strike my hat and
bound quickly off. Astonished, for I was under no tree, under nothing
indeed but the blue of heaven, I looked about for the object that had
struck me. As I did so, I perceived my husband in his window, but his
eyes, while upon me, did not see me, for no change passed over him as I
groped about in the grass. "In o