My talk with Godensky at the stage door, my pause to pick him up, and my second pause to set him down, had all taken time, of which I had had little enough at the starting, if I were to meet Ivor Dundas when he arrived.  It was two or three minutes after midnight, or so my watch said, when we drew up before the gate of my high-walled garden in the quiet Rue d’Hollande.

A little while ago I had been ready to seize upon almost any expedient for keeping Raoul away from my house to-night, but now, after what I had just heard from Godensky, I prayed to see him waiting for me.

Nobody (except Ivor, concerning whom I’d given orders) would be let in so late at night, during my absence, not even Raoul himself; so if he had come to reproach me, or break with me, he would have to stand outside the locked gate till I appeared.  I looked for him longingly, but he was not there.  There was, to be sure, a motor brougham in the street, for a wonder (usually the Rue d’Hollande is as empty as a desert, after eleven o’clock), but a girl’s face peered out at me from the window—­an impish, curiously abnormal little face it was—­extinguishing the spark of hope that sprang to life as I caught sight of the carriage.

It was standing before the closed gate of a house almost opposite mine, and the girl seemed somewhat interested in me; but I was not at all interested in her, and I hate being stared at as if I were something in a museum.

The gate is always kept locked at night, when I’m at the theatre; but Marianne has the key, and we let ourselves in when we come, for only old Henri sits up, and he is growing a little deaf.  A moment, and we were inside, the chauffeur spinning away to the garage.

Usually I am newly delighted every night with my quaint old house and its small, but pretty garden, to which it seems delightful to come home after hours of hard work at the theatre.  But to-night, though a cheerful light shone out from between the drawn curtains of the salon, the place looked inexpressibly dreary, even forbidding, to me.  I felt that I hated the house, though I had chosen it after a long search for peacefulness and privacy.  How gloomy, how dead, was the street beyond the high wall, with all its windows closed like the eyes of corpses.  There was a moist, depressing smell of earth after long-continued rains, in the garden.  No wonder the place had been to let at a bargain, for a long term!  There had been a murder in it once, and it had stood empty for twelve or thirteen of the fifteen years since the almost forgotten tragedy.  I had been the tenant for two years now—­before I became a “star,” with a theatre of my own in Paris.  I had had no fear of the ghost said to haunt the house.  Indeed, I remembered thinking, and saying, that the story only made the place more interesting.  But now I said to myself that I wished I had never spoken so lightly.  Perhaps the ghost had brought me bad luck.  I felt as if the murder must have happened on just such a still, brooding, damp night as this.  Maybe it was the anniversary, if I only knew.