would be let in
so late at night, during my absence, not even Raoul himself; so if he
had come to reproach me, or break with me, he would have to stand
outside the locked gate till I appeared. I looked for him longingly, but
he was not there. There was, to be sure, a motor brougham in the street,
for a wonder (usually the Rue d'Hollande is as empty as a desert, after
eleven o'clock), but a girl's face peered out at me from the window--an
impish, curiously abnormal little face it was--extinguishing the spark
of hope that sprang to life as I caught sight of the carriage.

It was standing before the closed gate of a house almost opposite mine,
and the girl seemed somewhat interested in me; but I was not at all
interested in her, and I hate being stared at as if I were something in
a museum.

The gate is always kept locked at night, when I'm at the theatre; but
Marianne has the key, and we let ourselves in when we come, for only old
Henri sits up, and he is growing a little deaf. A moment, and we were
inside, the chauffeur spinning away to the garage.

Usually I am newly delighted every night with my quaint old house and
its small, but pretty garden, to which it seems delightful to come home
after hours of hard work at the theatre. But to-night, though a cheerful
light shone out from between the drawn curtains of the salon, the place
looked inexpressibly dreary, even forbidding, to me. I felt that I hated
the house, though I had chosen it after a long search for peacefulness
and privacy. How gloomy, how dead, was the street beyond the high wall,
with all its windows closed like the eyes of corpses. There was a moist,
depressing smell of earth after long-continued rains, in the garden. No
wonder the place had been to let at a bargain, for a long term! There
had been a murder in it once, and it had stood empty for twelve or
thirteen of the fifteen years since the almost forgotten tragedy. I had
been the tenant for two years now--before I became a "star," with a
theatre of my own in Paris. I had had no fear of the ghost said to haunt
the house. Indeed, I remembered thinking, and saying, that the story
only made the place more interesting. But now I said to myself that I
wished I had never spoken so lightly. Perhaps the ghost had brought me
bad luck. I felt as if the murder must have happened on just such a
still, brooding, damp night as this. Maybe it was the anniversary, if I
only knew.

I went indoors, Marianne following