ess.

I began to think how far I had already come, and to consider whether I
could retrace my steps with accuracy in case of a panic, and I had serious
thoughts of returning.

The idea of Mr. Charke was growing unpleasantly sharp and menacing; and
as I looked down the long space before me, losing itself among ambiguous
shadows, lulled in a sinister silence, and as it were inviting my entrance
like a trap, I was very near yielding to the cowardly impulse.

But I took heart of grace and determined to see a little more. I opened a
side-door, and entered a large room, where were, in a corner, some rusty
and cobwebbed bird-cages, but nothing more. It was a wainscoted room, but
a white mildew stained the panels. I looked from the window: it commanded
that dismal, weed-choked quadrangle into which I had once looked from
another window. I opened a door at its farther end, and entered another
chamber, not quite so large, but equally dismal, with the same prison-like
look-out, not very easily discerned through the grimy panes and the sleet
that was falling thickly outside. The door through which I had entered made
a little accidental creak, and, with my heart at my lips, I gazed at it,
expecting to see Charke, or the skeleton of which I had talked so lightly,
stalk in at the half-open aperture. But I had an odd sort of courage which
was always fighting against my cowardly nerves, and I walked to the door,
and looking up and down the dismal passage, was reassured.

Well, one room more--just that whose deep-set door fronted me, with a
melancholy frown, at the opposite end of the chamber. So to it I glided,
shoved it open, advancing one step, and the great bony figure of Madame de
la Rougierre was before me.

I could see nothing else.

The drowsy traveller who opens his sheets to slip into bed, and sees a
scorpion coiled between them, may have experienced a shock the same in
kind, but immeasurably less in degree.

She sat in a clumsy old arm-chair, with an ancient shawl about her, and
her bare feet in a delft tub. She looked a thought more withered. Her wig
shoved back disclosed her bald wrinkled forehead, and enhanced the ugly
effect of her exaggerated features and the gaunt hollows of her face. With
a sense of incredulity and terror I gazed, freezing, at this evil phantom,
who returned my stare for a few seconds with a shrinking scowl, dismal and
grim, as of an evil spirit detected.

The meeting, at least then and there, w