n any of the dusty,
sparsely furnished rooms and halls through which I hunted. The ancient
locks on doors and windows were fastened as I had left them, although my
lady certainly had entered and left at her pleasure. Puzzled and amused,
I finally returned to my bedchamber.

There was some difference in that room. I was conscious of the fact as
soon as I entered and closed the door behind me. The candle still burned
where I had left it, flickering slightly in some current of air. There
was no change that the eye could find, no sound except the rain, yet I
felt an extreme reluctance to go on even a step from where I stood. What
I wanted to do was to tear open the door behind me, to rush out into the
hall and slam the door shut between this room and myself.

Why? I looked around me, sending the beam of the flashlight playing over
the quiet place. Nothing, of course! I walked over to the bookcase, took
up the braid I had left there, and sat down in an old armchair to study
my trophy. On principle and by habit I had no intention of being
mastered by nerves. It was humiliating to discover that I could be made
nervous by the mere fact of being in an unoccupied farmhouse after
midnight.

The braid was magnificent. It was as broad as my palm, yet compressed so
tightly that it was thick and solid to the touch. If released over
someone's shoulders, it would have been a sumptuous cloak, indeed! In
what madness of panic had the girl sacrificed this beauty? How she must
hate me, now the panic was past! The color, too, was unique, in my
experience; a gold as vivid as auburn. Or was it tinged with auburn? As
I leaned forward to catch the candle-light, a drift of that fragrance
worn by my visitor floated from her braid.

At once I knew what had changed in the room. The air that had been so
pure when the house was opened, now was heavy with an odor of damp and
mould that had seeped into the atmosphere as moisture will seep through
cellar walls. One would have said that the door of some hideous vault
had been opened into my bedchamber. This stench struggled, as it were,
with the volatile perfume that clung about the braid; so that my senses
were thrust back and forth between disgust and delight in the strangest
wavering of sensation.

I made the strongest effort to put away the effect this wavering had
upon me. I forced myself to sit still and think of normal things; of the
men whom I was to see next morning, of the plans I meant to