ast
rooms. In a few minutes she was strong enough to rise from the chair, to
take the keys from her pocket, and to look round her.

The first objects of furniture in the room which attracted her attention
were an old bureau of carved oak, and a heavy buhl table with a cabinet
attached. She tried the bureau first; it looked the likeliest receptacle
for papers of the two. Three of the keys proved to be of a size to enter
the lock, but none of them would turn it. The bureau was unassailable.
She left it, and paused to trim the wick of the candle before she tried
the buhl cabinet next.

At the moment when she raised her hand to the candle, she heard the
stillness of the Banqueting-Hall shudder with the terror of a sound--a
sound faint and momentary, like the distant rushing of the wind.

The sliding door in the drawing-room had moved.

Which way had it moved? Had an unknown hand pushed it back in its socket
further than she had pushed it, or pulled it to again, and closed it?
The horror of being shut out all night, by some undiscoverable agency,
from the life of the house, was stronger in her than the horror of
looking across the Banqueting-Hall. She made desperately for the door of
the room.

It had fallen to silently after her when she had come in, but it was not
closed. She pulled it open, and looked.

The sight that met her eyes rooted her, panic-stricken, to the spot.

Close to the first of the row of windows, counting from the
drawing-room, and full in the gleam of it, she saw a solitary figure. It
stood motionless, rising out of the furthest strip of moonlight on the
floor. As she looked, it suddenly disappeared. In another instant she
saw it again, in the second strip of moonlight--lost it again--saw it in
the third strip--lost it once more--and saw it in the fourth. Moment by
moment it advanced, now mysteriously lost in the shadow, now suddenly
visible again in the light, until it reached the fifth and nearest strip
of moonlight. There it paused, and strayed aside slowly to the middle of
the Hall. It stopped at the tripod, and stood, shivering audibly in the
silence, with its hands raised over the dead ashes, in the action of
warming them at a fire. It turned back again, moving down the path of
the moonlight, stopped at the fifth window, turned once more, and came
on softly through the shadow straight to the place where Magdalen stood.

Her voice was dumb, her will was helpless. Every sense in her but the