But her vigil had been too long, her loneliness too complete. Her earlier
impression of the presence of death in the decaying house tightened its
hold. She had to assure herself that Silas Blackburn slept untroubled.
The thing she had heard was peculiar, and he hadn't answered across the
court. The dark, empty corridors at first were an impassable barrier, but
while she put on her slippers and her dressing-gown she strengthened her
courage. There was a bell rope in the upper hall. She might get Jenkins.

When she stood in the main hall she hesitated. It would probably be a
long time, provided he heard at all, before Jenkins could answer her. Her
candle outlined the entrance to the musty corridor. Just a few running
steps down there, a quick rap at the door, and, perhaps, in an instant
her uncle's voice, and the blessed power to return to her room and sleep!

While her fear grew she called on her pride to let her accomplish that
brief, abhorrent journey.

Then for the first time a different doubt came to her. As she waited
alone in this disturbing nocturnal intimacy of an old house, she shrank
from no thought of human intrusion, and she wondered if her uncle had
been afraid of that, too, of the sort of thing that might lurk in the
ancient wing with its recollections of birth and suffering and death. But
he had gone there as an escape. Surely he had been afraid of men. It
shamed her that, in spite of that, her fear defined itself ever more
clearly as something indefinable. With a passionate determination to
strangle such thoughts she held her breath. She tried to close her mind.
She entered the corridor. She ran its length. She knocked at the locked
door of the old bedroom. She shrank as the echoes rattled from the dingy
walls where her candle cast strange reflections. There was no other
answer. A sense of an intolerable companionship made her want to cry out