in her possession in a moment; and was
away again, along the solitary passages that
led to the north rooms, threading their turnings
and windings as if she had left them
but the day before; never pausing to listen
or to look behind her, never slackening her
speed till she was at the top of the back
staircase, and had her hand on the locked
door that led into the north hall.

As she turned over the bunch to find the
first key that was required, she discovered—
what her hurry had hitherto prevented her
from noticing— the numbered labels which
the builder had methodically attached to all
the keys, when he had been sent to Porthgenna
by Mr. Frankland to survey the house.
At the first sight of them, her searching
hands paused in their work instantaneously,
and she shivered all over, as if a sudden chill
had struck her.

If she had been less violently agitated, the
discovery of the new labels and the suspicions
to which the sight of them instantly gave
rise would, in all probability, have checked
her further progress. But the confusion of
her mind was now too great to allow her to
piece together even the veriest fragments of
thoughts. Vaguely conscious of a new terror,
of a sharpened distrust that doubled and
trebled the headlong impatience which had
driven her on thus far, she desperately
resumed her search through the bunch of keys.
One of them had no label; it was larger
than the rest— it was the key that fitted the
door of communication before which she
stood. She turned it in the rusty lock with
a strength which, at any other time, she
would have been utterly incapable of exerting;
she opened the door with a blow of her
hand, which burst it away at one stroke from
the jambs to which it stuck. Panting for
breath, she flew across the forsaken north
hall, without stopping for one second to push
the door to behind her. The creeping
creatures, the noisome house-reptiles that
possessed the place, crawled away, shadowlike,
on either side of her towards the walls.
She never noticed them, never turned away
for them. Across the hall, and up the stairs
at the end of it, she ran, till she gained the
open landing at the top— and there, she suddenly
checked herself in front of the first
door.

The first door of the long range of rooms
that opened on the landing; the door that
fronted the topmost of the flight of stairs.
She stopped; she looked at it— it was not
the door she had come to open; and yet she
could not tear herself away from it. Scrawled
on the panel in white chalk was the figure
— "I." And when she looked down at the
bunch of keys in her hands, there was the
figure "I.," on a label, answering to it.

She tried to think, to follow out any one
of all the thronging suspicions that beset her,
to the conclusion at which it might point.
The effort was useless; her mind was gone;
her bodily senses of seeing and hearing—
senses which had now become painfully and
incomprehensibly sharpened— seemed to be
the sole relics of intelligence that she had left
to guide her. She put her hand over her
eyes, and waited a little so, and then went
on slowly along the landing, looking at the
doors.

No. "II.," No. "III.," No. "IV.," traced
on the panels in the same white chalk, and
answering to the numbered labels on the
keys, the figures on which were written in
ink. No. "IV." the middle room of the first
floor range of eight. She stopped there again,
trembling from head to foot. It was the
door of the Myrtle Room.

Did the chalked numbers stop there? She
looked on, down the landing. No. The four
doors remaining were regularly numbered on
to "VIII."

She came back again to the door of the
Myrtle Room, sought out the key labelled
with the figure "IV."— hesitated— and looked
back distrustfully over the deserted hall.

The canvases of the old family pictures,
which she had seen bulging out from their
frames, in the past time when she hid the
letter, had, for the most part, rotted away
from them now, and lay in great black ragged
strips on the floor of the hall. Islands and
continents of damp spread like the map of
some strange region over the lofty vaulted
ceiling. Cobwebs, heavy with dust, hung
down in festoons from broken cornices. Dirt
stains lay on the stone pavement, like gross
reflections of the damp stains on the ceiling.
The broad flight of stairs leading up to the
open landing before the rooms of the first
floor, had sunk down bodily towards one side.
The banisters which protected the outer
edge of the landing were broken away into
ragged gaps. The light of day was stained,
the air of heaven was stilled, the sounds of
earth were silenced in the north hall.

Silenced? Were all sounds silenced? Or
was there something stirring that just
touched the sense of hearing, that just deepened
the dismal stillness, and no more?

Sarah listened, keeping her face still set
towards the hall— listened, and heard a faint
sound behind her. Was it outside the door
on which her back was turned? Or was it
inside— in the Myrtle Room?

Inside. With the first conviction of that,
all thought, all sensation left her. She forgot
the suspicious numbering of the doors; she
became insensible to the lapse of time,
unconscious of the risk of discovery. All exercise
of her other faculties was now merged in
the exercise of the one faculty of listening.

It was a still, faint, stealthily-rustling
sound; and it moved to and fro at intervals,
to and fro softly, now at one end, now at
the other of the Myrtle Room. There were
moments when it grew suddenly distinct—
other moments when it died away in
gradations too light to follow. Sometimes it