It was worse than ever.  The world seemed filled with its din.  Hurling itself passionately against the house, it gathered strength with every gust, till it seemed as if the old walls must soon crash in ruins round me.  Gust upon gust; blow upon blow; swelling, lessening, never ceasing.  The noise surrounded me; it penetrated my inmost being, as all-pervading as silence itself, and wrapping me in a solitude even more complete.  There was nothing left in the world but the wind and I, and then a weird intangible doubt as to my own identity seized me.  The wind was real, the wind with its echoes of passion and misery from the eternal abyss; but was there anything else?  What was, and what had been, the world of sense and of knowledge, my own consciousness, my very self,—­all seemed gathered up and swept away in that one sole-existent fury of sound.

I pulled myself together, and getting out of bed, groped my way to the table which stood between the bed and the fireplace.  The matches were there, and my half-burnt candle, which I lit.  The wind penetrating the rattling casement circled round the room, and the flame of my candle bent and flared and shrank before it, throwing strange moving lights and shadows in every corner.  I stood there shivering in my thin nightdress, half stunned by the cataract of noise beating on the walls outside, and peered anxiously around me.  The room was not the same.  Something was changed.  What was it?  How the shadows leaped and fell, dancing in time to the wind’s music.  Everything seemed alive.  I turned my head slowly to the left, and then to the right, and then round—­and stopped with a sudden gasp of fear.

The cabinet was open!

I looked away, and back, and again.  There was no room for doubt.  The doors were thrown back, and were waving gently in the draught.  One of the lower drawers was pulled out, and in a sudden flare of the candle-light I could see something glistening at its bottom.  Then the light dwindled again, the candle was almost out, and the cabinet showed a dim black mass in the darkness.  Up and down went the flame, and each returning brightness flashed back at me from the thing inside the drawer.  I stood fascinated, my eyes fixed upon the spot, waiting for the fitful glitter as it came and went.  What was there there?  I knew that I must go and see, but I did not want to.  If only the cabinet would close again before I looked, before I knew what was inside it.  But it stood open, and the glittering thing lay there, dragging me towards itself.

Slowly at last, and with infinite reluctance, I went.  The drawer was lined with soft white satin, and upon the satin lay a long, slender knife, hilted and sheathed in antique silver, richly set with jewels.  I took it up and turned back to the table to examine it.  It was Italian in workmanship, and I knew that the carving and chasing of the silver were more precious even than the jewels which studded it, and