There was another week of our visit still, and we stayed it out to the end without disaster.  My desire to leave at times became that frantic thing, desire to escape; but I controlled it, kept silent, watched and wondered.  Nothing happened.  As before, and everywhere, there was no sequence of development, no connection between cause and effect; and climax, none whatever.  The thing swayed up and down, backwards and forwards like a great loose curtain in the wind, and I could only vaguely surmise what caused the draught or why there was a curtain at all.  A novelist might mold the queer material into coherent sequence that would be interesting but could not be true.

It remains, therefore, not a story but a history.  Nothing happened.

Perhaps my intense dislike of the fall of darkness was due wholly to my stirred imagination, and perhaps my anger when I learned that Frances now occupied a bed in our hostess’s room was unreasonable.  Nerves were unquestionably on edge.  I was forever on the lookout for some event that should make escape imperative, but yet that never presented itself.  I slept lightly, left my door ajar to catch the slightest sound, even made stealthy tours of the house below-stairs while everybody dreamed in their beds.  But I discovered nothing; the doors were always locked; I neither saw the housekeeper again in unreasonable times and places, nor heard a footstep in the passages and halls.  The Noise was never once repeated.  That horrible, ultimate thunder, my intensest dread of all, lay withdrawn into the abyss whence it had twice arisen.  And though in my thoughts it was sternly denied existence, the great black reason for the fact afflicted me unbelievably.  Since Mabel’s fruitless effort to escape, the Doors kept closed remorselessly.  She had failed; they gave up hope.  For this was the explanation that haunted the region of my mind where feelings stir and hint before they clothe themselves in actual language.  Only I firmly kept it there; it never knew expression.

But, if my ears were open, my eyes were opened too, and it were idle to pretend that I did not notice a hundred details that were capable of sinister interpretation had I been weak enough to yield.  Some protective barrier had fallen into ruins round me, so that Terror stalked behind the general collapse, feeling for me through all the gaping fissures.  Much of this, I admit, must have been merely the elaboration of those sensations I had first vaguely felt, before subsequent events and my talks with Frances had dramatized them into living thoughts.  I therefore leave them unmentioned in this history, just as my mind left them unmentioned in that interminable final week.  Our life went on precisely as before—­Mabel unreal and outwardly so still; Frances, secretive, anxious, tactful to the point of slyness, and keen to save to the point of self-forgetfulness.