“He felt nervous and puzzled and opened the inner door and went out on to the carriage-circle.  Almost directly afterward the great hall door swung to with a crash behind him.  He told me that he had a sudden awful feeling of having been trapped in some way—­that is how he put it.  He whirled ’round and gripped the door handle, but something seemed to be holding it with a vast grip on the other side.  Then, before he could be fixed in his mind that this was so, he was able to turn the handle and open the door.

“He paused a moment in the doorway and peered into the hall, for he had hardly steadied his mind sufficiently to know whether he was really frightened or not.  Then he heard his sweetheart blow him a kiss out of the greyness of the big, unlit hall and he knew that she had followed him from the boudoir.  He blew her a kiss back and stepped inside the doorway, meaning to go to her.  And then, suddenly, in a flash of sickening knowledge he knew that it was not his sweetheart who had blown him that kiss.  He knew that something was trying to tempt him alone into the darkness and that the girl had never left the boudoir.  He jumped back and in the same instant of time he heard the kiss again, nearer to him.  He called out at the top of his voice:  ’Mary, stay in the boudoir.  Don’t move out of the boudoir until I come to you.’  He heard her call something in reply from the boudoir and then he had struck a clump of a dozen or so matches and was holding them above his head and looking ’round the hall.  There was no one in it, but even as the matches burned out there came the sounds of a great horse galloping down the empty drive.

“Now you see, both he and the girl had heard the sounds of the horse galloping; but when I questioned more closely I found that the aunt had heard nothing, though it is true she is a bit deaf, and she was further back in the room.  Of course, both he and Miss Hisgins had been in an extremely nervous state and ready to hear anything.  The door might have been slammed by a sudden puff of wind owing to some inner door being opened; and as for the grip on the handle, that may have been nothing more than the snick catching.

“With regard to the kisses and the sounds of the horse galloping, I pointed out that these might have seemed ordinary enough sounds, if they had been only cool enough to reason.  As I told him, and as he knew, the sounds of a horse galloping carry a long way on the wind so that what he had heard might have been nothing more than a horse being ridden some distance away.  And as for the kiss, plenty of quiet noises—­the rustle of a paper or a leaf—­have a somewhat similar sound, especially if one is in an overstrung condition and imagining things.

“I finished preaching this little sermon on commonsense versus hysteria as we put out the lights and left the billiard room.  But neither Beaumont nor Miss Hisgins would agree that there had been any fancy on their parts.