afterwards, I put the same plan in operation with precisely the same
result. The light was always there.

Having my attention thus concentrated as it were upon this one room, and
lying awake so many hours when I ought to have been asleep, my
suspicions gradually merged into certainty that it was visited every
midnight by someone who came and went so lightly and quietly that only
by intently listening could I distinguish the exact moment of their
passing my door. Who was this visitor that came and went so
mysteriously? To discover this, without being myself discovered, was a
matter that required both tact and courage, but it was one on which I
was almost as much a monomaniac as a child well can be. To have opened
my door when the landing was perfectly dark would have been to see
nothing. To have opened the door with a candle in my hand would have
been to betray myself. I must wait for a moonlight night, which would
light up the landing sufficiently for my purpose. I waited. My
opportunity came. With my doorway in deep shadow, my door just
sufficiently open for me to peer through, and with the staircase lighted
up by rays of the moon, I saw and recognised the mysterious midnight
visitor to the room over mine. I saw and recognised Sister Agnes.




CHAPTER VII.

EXIT JANET HOPE.


The effect upon me of the discovery that Sister Agnes was the midnight