and beauty of the spectacle. The Tudor front had the air of
some fairy banqueting-hall lit by unearthly hands for some weird
gathering of ghostly knights. Then she turned to her room, impatiently
longing in her sick fatigue to be quit of her dress and ornaments and
tumble into sleep.

Yet she made no hurry. She fell on the first chair that offered. Her
candle behind her had little power over the glooms of the dark
tapestried room, but it did serve to illuminate the lines of her own
form, as she saw it reflected in the big glass of her wardrobe, straight
in front of her. She sat with her hands round her knees, absently
looking at herself, a white long-limbed apparition struck out of the
darkness. But she was conscious of nothing save one mounting
overwhelming passionate desire, almost a cry.

Mr. Wharton must go away--he _must_--or she could not bear it.

Quick alternations of insight, memory, self-recognition, self-surrender,
rose and broke upon her. At last, physical weariness recalled her. She
put up her hands to take off her pearls.

As she did so, she started, hearing a noise that made her turn her head.
Just outside her door a little spiral staircase led down from her
corridor to the one below, which ran at the back of the old library, and
opened into the Cedar Garden at its further end.

Steps surely--light steps--along the corridor outside, and on the
staircase. Nor did they die away. She could still hear them,--as she
sat, arrested, straining her ears,--pacing slowly along the lower
passage.

Her heart, after its pause, leapt into fluttering life. This room of
hers, the two passages, the library, and the staircase, represented that
part of the house to which the ghost stories of Mellor clung most
persistently. Substantially the block of building was of early Tudor
date, but the passages and the staircase had been alterations made with
some clumsiness at the time of the erection of the eighteenth-century
front, with a view to bringing these older rooms into the general plan.
Marcella, however, might demonstrate as she pleased that the Boyce who
was supposed to have stabbed himself on the staircase died at least
forty years before the staircase was made. None the less, no servant
would go alone, if she could help it, into either passage after dark;
and there was much excited marvelling how Miss Boyce could sleep where
she did. Deacon abounded in stories of things spiritual and peripatetic,
of steps, groans,