“That I was spared this ordeal for the first time this very night first comforted me, then added to my distress.  He had discovered his loss and was angry.  On the morrow he would ask me for the box and I would have to lie, for never could I find the courage to tell him where I had been.  Such an act of presumption he would never forgive, or so I thought as I lay and shivered in my little bed.  That his coldness, his neglect, sprang from the discovery just made that my mother as well as my father had just fled the house forever was as little known to me as the morning calamity.  I had been given my usual tendance and was tucked safely into bed; but the gloom, the silence which presently settled upon the house had a very different explanation in my mind from the real one.  My sin (for such it loomed large in my mind by this time) coloured the whole situation and accounted for every event.

“At what hour I slipped from my bed on to the cold floor, I shall never know.  To me it seemed to be in the dead of night; but I doubt if it were more than ten.  So slowly creep away the moments to a wakeful child.  I had made a great resolve.  Awful as the prospect seemed to me,—­frightened as I was by the very thought,—­ I had determined in my small mind to go down into the cellar, and into that midnight hole again, in search of the lost box.  I would take a candle and matches, this time from my own mantel-shelf, and if everyone was asleep, as appeared from the deathly quiet of the house, I would be able to go and come without anybody ever being the wiser.

“Dressing in the dark, I found my matches and my candle and, putting them in one of my pockets, softly opened my door and looked out.  Nobody was stirring; every light was out except a solitary one in the lower hall.  That this still burned conveyed no meaning to my mind.  How could I know that the house was so still and the rooms dark because everyone was out searching for some clue to my mother’s flight?  If I had looked at the clock—­ but I did not; I was too intent upon my errand, too filled with the fever of my desperate undertaking, to be affected by anything not bearing directly upon it.

“Of the terror caused by my own shadow on the wall as I made the turn in the hall below, I have as keen a recollection today as though it happened yesterday.  But that did not deter me; nothing deterred me, till safe in the cellar I crouched down behind the casks to get my breath again before entering the hole beyond.

“I had made some noise in feeling my way around these casks, and I trembled lest these sounds had been heard upstairs!  But this fear soon gave place to one far greater.  Other sounds were making themselves heard.  A din of small skurrying feet above, below, on every side of me!  Rats! rats in the wall! rats on the cellar bottom!  How I ever stirred from the spot I do not know, but when I did stir, it was to go forward, and enter the uncanny hole.