to see nothing.  To have opened the door with a candle in my hand would have been to betray myself.  I must wait for a moonlight night, which would light up the landing sufficiently for my purpose.  I waited.  My opportunity came.  With my doorway in deep shadow, my door just sufficiently open for me to peer through, and with the staircase lighted up by rays of the moon, I saw and recognised the mysterious midnight visitor to the room over mine.  I saw and recognised Sister Agnes.

CHAPTER VII.

Exit Janet hope.

The effect upon me of the discovery that Sister Agnes was the midnight visitor of the room over mine was at once to stifle that brood of morbid fancies with which of late both room and visitor had become associated in my mind.  I loved her so thoroughly, she was to me so complete an embodiment of all that was noble and beautiful in womanhood, that however unsatisfying to my curiosity such visits might be, I could not doubt that she must have excellent reasons for making them.  One thing was quite evident, that since she herself had said nothing respecting the room and her visits to it, it was impossible for me to question her on the matter.  Such being the case, I felt that it would be a poor return for all her goodness to me to question Dance or any other person respecting what she herself wished to keep concealed.  Besides, it was doubtful whether Dance would tell me anything, even if I were to ask her.  She had warned me a few hours after my arrival at Deepley Walls that there were many things under that roof respecting which I must seek no explanation; and with no one of the other domestics was I in any way intimate.

Still my curiosity remained unsatisfied; still over the room itself hung a veil of mystery which I would fain have lifted.  All my visits to the room to see whether the light shone under the door had hitherto been made previously to the midnight visits of Sister Agnes.  The question that now arose in my mind was whether the mysterious thread of light was or was not visible after Sister Agnes’s customary visit—­whether, in fact, it shone there all the night through.  In order to solve this doubt, I lay awake the night following that of my discovery of Sister Agnes.  Listening intently, with my bed-room door ajar, I heard her go upstairs, and ten minutes later I could just distinguish her smothered footfall as she came down.  I heard the door at the bottom of the corridor shut behind her, and then I knew that I was safe.

Slipping out of bed, I stole, barefooted as I was, out of my bed-room and up the flight of stairs which led to the black door.  Of ghosts in the ordinary meaning of that word—­in the meaning which it has for five children out of six—­I had no fear; my fears, such as they were, ran in quite another groove.  I went upstairs slowly, with shut eyes, counting each stair as I put my feet on it from