not
yet lit as the evening had come earlier than usual.

"Well, it seems that the door into the hall was open and suddenly the
girl said: 'H'sh! what's that?'

"They both listened and then Beaumont heard it--the sound of a horse
outside of the front door.

"'Your father?' he suggested, but she reminded him that her father was
not riding.

"Of course they were both ready to feel queer, as you can suppose, but
Beaumont made an effort to shake this off and went into the hall to see
whether anyone was at the entrance. It was pretty dark in the hall and he
could see the glass panels of the inner draft door, clear-cut in the
darkness of the hall. He walked over to the glass and looked through into
the drive beyond, but there nothing in sight.

"He felt nervous and puzzled and opened the inner door and went out on to
the carriage-circle. Almost directly afterward the great hall door swung
to with a crash behind him. He told me that he had a sudden awful feeling
of having been trapped in some way--that is how he put it. He whirled
'round and gripped the door handle, but something seemed to be holding it
with a vast grip on the other side. Then, before he could be fixed in his
mind that this was so, he was able to turn the handle and open the door.

"He paused a moment in the doorway and peered into the hall, for he had
hardly steadied his mind sufficiently to know whether he was really
frightened or not. Then he heard his sweetheart blow him a kiss out of
the greyness of the big, unlit hall and he knew that she had followed him
from the boudoir. He blew her a kiss back and stepped inside the doorway,
meaning to go to her. And then, suddenly, in a flash of sickening
knowledge he knew that it was not his sweetheart who had blown him that
kiss. He knew that something was trying to tempt him alone into the
darkness and that the girl had never left the boudoir. He jumped back and
in the same instant of time he heard the kiss again, nearer to him. He
called out at the top of his voice: 'Mary, stay in the boudoir. Don't
move out of the boudoir until I come to you.' He heard her call something
in reply from the boudoir and then he had struck a clump of a dozen or
so matches and was holding them above his head and looking 'round the
hall. There was no one in it, but even as the matches burned out there
came the sounds of a great horse galloping down the empty drive.

"Now you see, both he and the girl had heard the sounds of the