I rang again, and still no result, and the influence of the shut-up and abandoned house with all its shadows and memories began to chill me.  I set the hall door open wide, and then I found the door at the back of the hall that led to the servants’ quarters and opened that.

A rush of cold, damp air came up in my face with a mouldering smell.

“Bridget Kelly!” I called.  “Bridget Kelly!”

The sound echoed as though through many vaults of stone and there was no answer.

The place and the silence began to get on my nerves.  I remembered its forty-six rooms, all shut up and the furniture swathed in holland where the rooms were not empty.  I have always had a dread of an empty house, and now it seized upon me.  I could have run away out into the sunshine to the cabman whom I had left feeding his horse.  When I had looked back before entering he and his horse had been the only living things in the black street.

But I would not run away.  It would be a pretty thing to go home to my grandmother and tell her that I was afraid of the house because I could not make Bridget Kelly hear me and had run away in the full sunshine of a June day.

Probably Bridget was upstairs in some one of the forty-six rooms.

From the hall itself four doors of very fine wine-red mahogany opened.  I looked into one after the other.  They were reception-rooms of great size, so far as I could judge; but the sun was the other side of the house, and only an eastern light came in through the chinks of the window shutters.  The rooms were full of sheeted shapes in the dimness.  I don’t think I could have brought myself to go into them.  I know I closed each door with a hasty bang, as though it had been a Blue Beard’s Chamber.

As I went upstairs my heels made a great noise on the marble steps.  At the head of the stairs I came upon a door which had once been of red baize, although now the baize was in tatters.  Beyond it was a long corridor, shuttered like the rest of the house.

I left the baize door open behind me while I peeped fearfully into one room after another whose doors led off from the corridor.  These were bedrooms, and it was worse than downstairs.  I could see the great four-posters glimmering in the darkness.  The smell of mildew was everywhere.

Suddenly my courage gave out.  I had an idea.  Supposing that Bridget Kelly was lying dead in one of these rooms or the great stone kitchens below!

I turned about hastily, dreading what lay behind me.  I would come another time with my godmother.  How could one tell who was skulking in the house?  The door had been open when I came to it.

And then—­I heard the hall door shut with a great bang.  There was no wind to shut it.  It was the last straw.  I fled precipitately through the baize door and on to the staircase, which was lit by a skylight overhead.  Even though I met the person who had shut the door I must make towards the sunlight and the world outside.