The moon was rounding the southern side of the house.  Her paling beams streamed through the nearer windows, and lay in long strips of slanting light on the marble pavement of the Hall.  The black shadows of the pediments between each window, alternating with the strips of light, heightened the wan glare of the moonshine on the floor.  Toward its lower end, the Hall melted mysteriously into darkness.  The ceiling was lost to view; the yawning fire-place, the overhanging mantel-piece, the long row of battle pictures above, were all swallowed up in night.  But one visible object was discernible, besides the gleaming windows and the moon-striped floor.  Midway in the last and furthest of the strips of light, the tripod rose erect on its gaunt black legs, like a monster called to life by the moon—­a monster rising through the light, and melting invisibly into the upper shadows of the Hall.  Far and near, all sound lay dead, drowned in the stagnant cold.  The soothing hush of night was awful here.  The deep abysses of darkness hid abysses of silence more immeasurable still.

She stood motionless in the door-way, with straining eyes, with straining ears.  She looked for some moving thing, she listened for some rising sound, and looked and listened in vain.  A quick ceaseless shivering ran through her from head to foot.  The shivering of fear, or the shivering of cold?  The bare doubt roused her resolute will.  “Now,” she thought, advancing a step through the door-way, “or never!  I’ll count the strips of moonlight three times over, and cross the Hall.”

“One, two, three, four, five.  One, two, three, four, five.  One, two, three, four, five.”

As the final number passed her lips at the third time of counting, she crossed the Hall.  Looking for nothing, listening for nothing, one hand holding the candle, the other mechanically grasping the folds of her dress, she sped, ghost-like, down the length of the ghostly place.  She reached the door of the first of the eastern rooms, opened it, and ran in.  The sudden relief of attaining a refuge, the sudden entrance into a new atmosphere, overpowered her for the moment.  She had just time to put the candle safely on a table before she dropped giddy and breathless into the nearest chair.

Little by little she felt the rest quieting her.  In a few minutes she became conscious of the triumph of having won her way to the east rooms.  In a few minutes she was strong enough to rise from the chair, to take the keys from her pocket, and to look round her.

The first objects of furniture in the room which attracted her attention were an old bureau of carved oak, and a heavy buhl table with a cabinet attached.  She tried the bureau first; it looked the likeliest receptacle for papers of the two.  Three of the keys proved to be of a size to enter the lock, but none of them would turn it.  The bureau was unassailable.  She left it, and paused to trim the wick of the candle before she tried the buhl cabinet next.