Just then the candle—­a treacherous thing—­flamed up and went out.

“Oh!” cried Mrs. Prockter.

And James had not a match.  He never smoked.  And without an atlas of the Hall, showing the location of match-boxes, he saw no hope of finding a match.

The fire was as good as gone.  A few cinders burnt red under the ash, showing the form of the chimney-piece, but no more.

“An ye got a match?” he asked her.

“No,” she said, drily, “I don’t carry matches.  But I can tell you I don’t like being in the dark at all.”  Her voice came to him out of nothing, and had a most curious effect on his spine.  “Where are you, Mr. Ollerenshaw?”

“I’m a-sitting here,” he replied.

“Well,” said she, “if you can’t find a match, I think you had better lead me to the door.  I certainly can’t find my way there myself.  Where is your hand?”

Then a hand touched his shoulder and burnt him.  “Is that you?” asked the voice.

“Ay!” he said.

And he took the hand, and the hand squeezed his hand—­squeezed it violently.  It may have been due to fear, it may have been due to mere inadvertence on the part of the hand; but the hand did, with unmistakable, charming violence, squeeze his hand.

And he rose.

“What’s that light there?” questioned the voice, in a whisper.

“Where?” he whispered also.

“There—­behind.”

He turned.  A luminance seemed to come from above, from the unseen heights of the magnificent double staircase.  As his eyes grew accustomed to the conditions, he gradually made out the details of the staircase.

“You’d better go and see,” the whispering voice commanded.

He dropped the hand and obeyed, creeping up the left wing of the staircase.  As he faced about at the half-landing, he saw Helen, in an orange-tinted peignoir, and her hair all down her back, holding a candle.  She beckoned to him.  He ascended to her.

“Who’s there?” she inquired, coldly.

“Mrs. Prockter,” he murmured.

“And are you sitting together in the dark?” she inquired, coldly.

The story that the candle had expired seemed feeble in the extreme.  And for him the word “cap” was written in letters of fire on the darkness below.

He made no attempt to answer her question.

CHAPTER XXIV

SEEING A LADY HOME

Those words of Helen’s began a fresh chapter in the life of her great-stepuncle, James Ollerenshaw.  They set up in him a feeling, or rather a whole range of feelings, which he had never before experienced.  At tea, Helen had hinted at the direction of Mrs. Prockter’s cap.  That was nothing.  He could not be held responsible for the direction of Mrs. Prockter’s cap.  He could laugh at that, even though he faintly blushed.  But to be caught sitting in the dark with Mrs. Prockter, after ten o’clock at night, in his own house; to have the fact pointed out to him in such a peculiar, meaningful tone as Helen employed—­here was something that connected him and Mrs. Prockter in a manner just a shade too serious for mere smiling.  Here was something that had not before happened to him in his career as rent-collector and sage.