Again the morning sunlight, the Man’s gay companionship, the hundreds of delightful things to do, wiped out that bad quarter of an hour, and again it never occurred to her to mention it.

The next night the remembrance came back so vividly after the Man had gone to his room, that she regretted she had not at least asked him if he had heard a carriage pass in the night.  Of course she was sure that he had not.  He was such a sound sleeper.  Besides, it was not important.  If he had, he would not have been nervous about it.  Still, she could not sleep, and, just before the dining room clock began to chime midnight—­she had never heard it before, and that she heard it now was a proof of how her whole body was listening—­again came the rapid tread of running horses.  This time every hair stood up on her head, and before she could control herself, she called out toward the open door:  “Dearest, are you awake?”

Almost before she had the words out he was standing smiling in the doorway.  It was all right.

“Did you think you heard a carriage come up the driveway?” she asked.

“Why, yes,” he replied, “but I didn’t.”

“Listen!  Is there some one coming along the corridor?”

He crossed the room quietly, opened the door, and turned on the light.  “No, dear.  There is no one there.”

“Hadn’t you better ring for your man, and have him see if any of the servants are up?”

He sat down on the edge of the bed, and laughed heartily.

“See here, dear girl,” he said, “you and I are a pair of healthy people.  We have happened to hear a noise which we can’t explain.  Be sure that there is rational explanation.  You’re not afraid?”

“Well, no, I really am not,” she declared, “but you cannot deny that it is strange.  Did you hear it last night?”

“Go on, now, with your cross-examination,” he said.  “Let’s go to sleep.  At any rate the exhibition is over for to-night.”

The fourth night they did not speak in the night any more than they had in the daytime.  But the next day they had a long conversation, the gist of which was this:  That they had bought the place, that except for fifteen minutes at midnight, the place was ideal.  They were both level-headed, neither believed in anything super-natural.  Were they to be driven out of such a place by so harmless a thing as an unexplained noise?  They could get used to it.  After a bit it would no more wake them up,—­such was the force of habit—­than the ticking of the clock.  To all this they both agreed, and the matter was dropped.

For ten days they did not mention it, but in all those ten days a sort of crescendo of emotion was going on in her.  At first she began to think of it as soon as bed-time approached; then she felt it intruding on her thoughts at the dinner table; then she was unable to sleep for an hour or two after the fifteen minutes had passed, and, finally, one night, she fled into his room to find him wide awake, just before dawn, and to confess that the shadow of midnight was stretched before and after until it was almost a black circle round the twenty-four hours.