out. I was sorry for her dislike, and yet glad that she dispensed with
my presence. I was far happier in the housekeeper's room, where I was
treated like a little queen. Dance and I soon learned to love each other
very heartily.

Those who have accompanied me thus far may not have forgotten the
account of my first night at Deepley Walls, nor how frightened I was by
the sound of certain mysterious footsteps in the room over mine. The
matter was explained simply enough by Dance next day as a whim of Lady
Chillington, who, for some reason best known to herself, chose that room
out of all the big old house as the scene of her midnight
perambulations. When, therefore, on one or two subsequent occasions, I
was disturbed in a similar way, I was no longer frightened, but only
rendered sleepless and uncomfortable for the time being. I felt at such
times, so profound was the surrounding silence, as if every living
creature in the world, save Lady Chillington and myself, were asleep.

But before long that room over mine acquired for itself in my mind a new
and dread significance. A consciousness gradually grew upon me that
there was about it something quite out of the common way; that its four
walls held within themselves some grim secret, the rites appertaining to
which were gone through when I and the rest of the uninitiated were
supposed to be in bed and asleep. I cannot tell what it was that first
made me suspect the existence of this secret. Certainly not the midnight
walks of Lady Chillington. Perhaps a certain impalpable atmosphere of
mystery, which, striking keenly on the sensitive nerves of a child,
strung by recent events to a higher pitch than usual, broke down the
first fine barrier that separates things common and of the earth earthy,
from those dim intuitions which even the dullest of us feel at times of
things spiritual and unseen. But however that may be, it so fell out