. Luttrell's room.
Not a sound: not a movement to be heard.

She stole away to the room which the nurse occupied. Mrs. Samson was
lying on her bed, breathing heavily: she seemed to be in a sound sleep.
Kitty shook her by the arm; but the woman only moaned and moved
uneasily, then snored more stertorously than before. The thought crossed
Kitty's mind that, perhaps, Hugo had not wanted Mrs. Samson to be awake.

She made up her mind to go to the housekeeper's room. It was situated in
that wing of the house which Kitty had once learnt to know only too
well. For some reason or other Hugo had insisted lately upon the
servants taking up their sleeping quarters in this wing; and although
Mrs. Shairp, who had returned to Netherglen upon his marriage, protested
that it was very inconvenient--"because no sound from the other side of
the house could reach their ears"--(how well Kitty remembered her saying
this!) yet even she had been obliged to give way to Hugo's will.

Kitty went to the door that communicated with the wing. She turned the
handle: it would not open. She shook it, and even knocked, but she dared
not make much noise. It was not a door that could be fastened or
unfastened from inside. Someone in the main part of the house,
therefore, must necessarily have turned the key and taken it away. One
thing was evident: the servants had been locked into their own rooms,
and it was quite impossible for Mrs. Shairp to come to her mistress's
room, unless the person who fastened the door came and unfastened it
again.

"I wonder that he did not lock me in," said Kitty to herself, wringing
her little hands as she came hopelessly down the great staircase into
the hall, and then up again to her own room. She had no doubt but that
it was Hugo who had done this thing for some end of his own. "What does
he mean? What is it that he does not want us to know?"

She reached her own room as she asked this question of herself. The door
resisted her hand as the door of the servants' wing had done. It was
locked, too. Hugo--or someone else--had turned the key, thinking that
she was safe in her own room, and wishing to keep her a prisoner until
morning.

Kitty's blood ran cold. Something was wrong: some dark intention must be
in Hugo's mind, or he would not have planned so carefully to keep the
household out of Mrs. Luttrell's room. She remembered that she had seen
a light in a bed-room near Hugo's own--the room where Stevens usually
slept