He was conscious of this result

before he had been in the room five minutes, and it was in the short

time they stayed there that he suffered the wholesale depletion of his

vital forces, which was, for himself, the chief horror of the whole

experience.

They put the candle on the floor of the cupboard, leaving the door

a few inches ajar, so that there was no glare to confuse the eyes, and

no shadow to shift about on walls and ceiling. Then they spread the

cloak on the floor and sat down to wait, with their backs against the

wall.

Shorthouse was within two feet of the door on to the landing; his

position commanded a good view of the main staircase leading down into

the darkness, and also of the beginning of the servants’ stairs going

to the floor above; the heavy stick lay beside him within easy reach.

The moon was now high above the house. Through the open window they

could see the comforting stars like friendly eyes watching in the sky.

One by one the clocks of the town struck midnight, and when the sounds

died away the deep silence of a windless night fell again over

everything. Only the boom of the sea, far away and lugubrious, filled

the air with hollow murmurs.

Inside the house the silence became awful; awful, he thought,

because any minute now it might be broken by sounds portending terror.

The strain of waiting told more and more severely on the nerves; they

talked in whispers when they talked at all, for their voices sounded

queer and unnatural. A chilliness, not altogether due to the night

air, invaded the room, and made them cold. The influences against

them, whatever these might be, were slowly robbing them of

self-confidence, and the power of decisive action; their forces were

on the wane, and the possibility of real fear took on a new and

terrible meaning. He began to tremble for the elderly woman by his

side, whose pluck could hardly save her beyond a certain extent.

He heard the blood singing in his veins. It sometimes seemed so

loud that he fancied it prevented his hearing properly certain other

sounds that were beginning very faintly to make themselves audible in

the depths of the house. Every time he fastened his attention on these

sounds, they instantly ceased. They certainly came no nearer. Yet he

could not rid himself of the idea that movement was going on somewhere

in the lower regions of the house. The drawing-room floor, where the

doors had been so strangely closed, seemed too near; the sounds were

further off than that. He thought of the great kitchen, with the

scurrying black beetles, and of the dismal little scullery; but,

somehow or other, they did not seem to come from there either. Surely

they were not outside the house!

Then, suddenly, the truth flashed into his mind, and for the space

of a minute he felt as if his blood had stopped flowing and turned to

ice.

The sounds were not downstairs at all; they were

upstairs—upstairs, somewhere among those horrid gloomy little

servants’ rooms with their bits of broken furniture, low ceilings, and

cramped windows—upstairs where the victim had first been disturbed

and stalked to her death.

And the moment he discovered where the sounds were, he began to

hear them more clearly.

It was the sound of feet, moving stealthily along the passage

overhead, in and out among the rooms, and past the furniture.

He turned quickly to steal a glance at the motionless figure seated

beside him, to note whether she had shared his discovery. The faint

candle-light coming through the crack in the cupboard door, threw her

strongly-marked face into vivid relief against the white of the wall.

But it was something else that made him catch his breath and stare

again. An extraordinary something had come into her face and seemed to

spread over her features like a mask; it smoothed out the deep lines

and drew the skin everywhere a little tighter so that the wrinkles

disappeared; it brought into the face—with the sole exception of the

old eyes—an appearance of youth and almost of childhood.

He stared in speechless amazement—amazement that was dangerously

near to horror. It was his aunt’s face indeed, but it was her face of

forty years ago, the vacant innocent face of a girl.

He had heard stories of that strange effect of terror which could

wipe a human countenance clean of other emotions, obliterating all

previous expressions; but he had never realised that it could be

literally true, or could mean anything so simply horrible as what he

now saw.