into the Cedar Garden, was a deep triangle of shadow, thrown by that part of the building in which she stood; and beyond the garden the barred black masses of the cedars closing up the view lent additional magic to the glittering unsubstantial fabric of the moonlit house, which was, as it were, embosomed and framed among them.  She paused a moment, struck by the strangeness and beauty of the spectacle.  The Tudor front had the air of some fairy banqueting-hall lit by unearthly hands for some weird gathering of ghostly knights.  Then she turned to her room, impatiently longing in her sick fatigue to be quit of her dress and ornaments and tumble into sleep.

Yet she made no hurry.  She fell on the first chair that offered.  Her candle behind her had little power over the glooms of the dark tapestried room, but it did serve to illuminate the lines of her own form, as she saw it reflected in the big glass of her wardrobe, straight in front of her.  She sat with her hands round her knees, absently looking at herself, a white long-limbed apparition struck out of the darkness.  But she was conscious of nothing save one mounting overwhelming passionate desire, almost a cry.

Mr. Wharton must go away—­he must—­or she could not bear it.

Quick alternations of insight, memory, self-recognition, self-surrender, rose and broke upon her.  At last, physical weariness recalled her.  She put up her hands to take off her pearls.

As she did so, she started, hearing a noise that made her turn her head.  Just outside her door a little spiral staircase led down from her corridor to the one below, which ran at the back of the old library, and opened into the Cedar Garden at its further end.

Steps surely—­light steps—­along the corridor outside, and on the staircase.  Nor did they die away.  She could still hear them,—­as she sat, arrested, straining her ears,—­pacing slowly along the lower passage.

Her heart, after its pause, leapt into fluttering life.  This room of hers, the two passages, the library, and the staircase, represented that part of the house to which the ghost stories of Mellor clung most persistently.  Substantially the block of building was of early Tudor date, but the passages and the staircase had been alterations made with some clumsiness at the time of the erection of the eighteenth-century front, with a view to bringing these older rooms into the general plan.  Marcella, however, might demonstrate as she pleased that the Boyce who was supposed to have stabbed himself on the staircase died at least forty years before the staircase was made.  None the less, no servant would go alone, if she could help it, into either passage after dark; and there was much excited marvelling how Miss Boyce could sleep where she did.  Deacon abounded in stories of things spiritual and peripatetic, of steps, groans, lights in the library, and the rest.  Marcella had consistently laughed at her.