I should have expected it, but I had not.  I remember standing in the back hall and debating whether to go on or to get out.  I was not only in a highly nervous state, but I was also badly handicapped.  However, as the moments wore on and I stood there, with the quiet unbroken by no mysterious sounds, I gained a certain confidence.  After a short period of readjustment, therefore, I felt my way to the library door, and into the room.  Once there, I used the flash to discover that the windows were shuttered, and proceeded to take off my hat and coat, which I placed on a chair near the door.  It was at this time that I discovered that the battery of my lamp was very weak, and finding a candle in a tall brass stick on the mantelpiece, I lighted it.

Then I looked about.  The house had evidently been hastily closed.  Some of the furniture was covered with sheets, while part of it stood unprotected.  The rug had been folded into the center of the room, and covered with heavy brown papers, and I was extremely startled to hear the papers rustling.  A mouse, however, proved to be the source of the sound, and I pulled myself together with a jerk.

It is to be remembered that I had left my hat and overcoat on a chair near the door.  There could be no mistake, as the chair was a light one, and the weight of my overcoat threw it back against the wall.

Candle in hand, I stepped out into the hail, and was immediately met by a crash which reverberated through the house.  In my alarm my teeth closed on the end of my tongue, with agonizing results, but the sound died away, and I concluded that an upper window had been left open, and that the rising wind had slammed a door.  But my morale, as we say since the war, had been shaken, and I recklessly lighted a second candle and placed it on the table in the hall at the foot of the staircase, to facilitate my exit in case I desired to make a hurried one.

Then I climbed slowly.  The fog had apparently made its way into the house, for when, halfway up, I turned and looked down, the candlelight was hardly more than a spark, surrounded by a luminous aura.

I do not know exactly when I began to feel that I was not alone in the house.  It was, I think, when I was on a chair on top of a table in Arthur’s room, with my candle upheld to the ceiling.  It seemed to me that something was moving stealthily in the room overhead.  I stood there, candle upheld, and every faculty I possessed seemed centered in my ears.  It was not a footstep.  It was a soft and dragging movement.  Had I not been near the ceiling I should not have heard it.  Indeed, a moment later I was not certain that I had heard it.

My chair, on top of the table, was none too securely balanced.  I had found what I was looking for, a part of the plaster ornament broken away, and replaced by a whitish substance, not plaster.  I got out my penknife and cut away the foreign matter, showing a small hole beneath, a bullet-hole, if I knew anything about bullet-holes.