Nina ripped her inchoate letters into small pieces, and, with a tart good-night to Miss Bella Perkins, who was closing her ledgers, the hour being close upon twelve-thirty, she passed sedately, stiffly, as though in performance of some vestal’s ritual, up the grand staircase.  Turning to the right at the first landing, she traversed a long corridor which was no part of the route to her cubicle on the ninth floor.  This corridor was lighted by glowing sparks, which hung on yellow cords from the central line of the ceiling; underfoot was a heavy but narrow crimson patterned carpet with a strip of polished oak parquet on either side of it.  Exactly along the central line of the carpet Nina tripped, languorously, like an automaton, and exactly over her head glittered the line of electric sparks.  The corridor and the journey seemed to be interminable, and Nina on some inscrutable and mystic errand.  At length she moved aside from the religious line, went into a service cabinet, and emerged with a small bunch of pass-keys.  No. 107 was Lionel Belmont’s sitting-room; No. 102, his bedroom, was opposite to 107.  No. 108, another sitting-room, was, as Nina knew, unoccupied.  She noiselessly let herself into No. 108, closed the door, and stood still.  After a minute she switched on the light.  These two rooms, Nos. 108 and 107, had once communicated, but, as space grew precious with the growing success of the Majestic, they had been finally separated, and the door between them locked and masked by furniture.  By reason of the door, Nina could hear Lionel Belmont moving to and fro in No. 107.  She listened a long time.  Then, involuntarily, she yawned with fatigue.

‘How silly of me to be here!’ she thought.  ‘What good will this do me?’

She extinguished the light and opened the door to leave.  At the same instant the door of No. 107, three feet off, opened.  She drew back with a start of horror.  Suppose she had collided with her father on the landing!  Timorously she peeped out, and saw Lionel Belmont, in his shirt-sleeves, disappear round the corner.

‘He is going to talk with his friend Mr. Pank,’ Nina thought, knowing that No. 120 lay at some little distance round that corner.

Mr. Belmont had left the door of No. 107 slightly ajar.  An unseen and terrifying force compelled Nina to venture into the corridor, and then to push the door of No. 107 wide open.  The same force, not at all herself, quite beyond herself, seemed to impel her by the shoulders into the room.  As she stood unmistakably within her father’s private sitting-room, scared, breathing rapidly, inquisitive, she said to herself: 

’I shall hear him coming back, and I can run out before he turns the corner of the corridor.’  And she kept her little pink ears alert.