When I awoke the candle had been extinguished. But I heard a step softly
approaching. I jumped up--quite forgetting the ghost, and thinking only of
Mary Quince--and opened the door, expecting to see the light of her candle.
Instead, all was dark, and near me I heard the fall of a bare foot on the
oak floor. It was as if some one had stumbled. I said, 'Mary,' but no
answer came, only a rustling of clothes and a breathing at the other side
of the gallery, which passed off towards the upper staircase. I turned into
my room, freezing with horror, and clapt my door. The noise wakened Mary
Quince, who had returned and gone to her bed half an hour before.

About a fortnight after this, Mary Quince, a very veracious spinster,
reported to me, that having got up to fix the window, which was rattling,
at about four o'clock in the morning, she saw a light shining from the
library window. She could swear to its being a strong light, streaming
through the chinks of the shutter, and moving. No doubt the link was waved
about his head by the angry 'link-man.'

These strange occurrences helped, I think, just then to make me nervous,
and prepared the way for the odd sort of ascendency which, through my
sense of the mysterious and super-natural, that repulsive Frenchwoman was
gradually, and it seemed without effort, establishing over me.

Some dark points of her character speedily emerged from the prismatic mist
with which she had enveloped it.

Mrs. Rusk's observation about the agreeability of new-comers I found to be
true; for as Madame began to lose that character, her good-humour abated
very perceptibly, and she began to show gleams of another sort of temper,
that was lurid and dangerous.