“I had intended to light my candle when I got inside; but for some reason I went stumbling along in the dark, following the wall till I got to the steps where I had dropped the box.  Here a light was necessary, but my hand did not go to my pocket.  I thought it better to climb the steps first, and softly one foot found the tread and then another.  I had only three more to climb and then my right hand, now feeling its way along the wall, would be free to strike a match.  I climbed the three steps and was steadying myself against the door for a final plunge, when something happened—­something so strange, so unexpected, and so incredible that I wonder I did not shriek aloud in my terror.  The door was moving under my hand.  It was slowly opening inward.  I could feel the chill made by the widening crack.  Moment by moment this chill increased; the gap was growing—­a presence was there-a presence before which I sank in a small heap upon the landing.  Would it advance?  Had it feet—­hands?  Was it a presence which could be felt?

“Whatever it was, it made no attempt to pass, and presently I lifted my head only to quake anew at the sound of a voice—­a human voice—­my mother’s voice—­so near me that by putting out my arms I might have touched her.

“She was speaking to my father.  I knew from the tone.  She was saying words which, little understood as they were, made such a havoc in my youthful mind that I have never forgotten the effect.

“‘I have come!’ she said.  ’They think I have fled the house and are looking far and wide for me.  We shall not be disturbed.  Who would think looking of here for either you or me.’

“Here!  The word sank like a plummet in my breast.  I had known for some few minutes that I was on the threshold of the forbidden room; but they were in it.  I can scarcely make you understand the tumult which this awoke in my brain.  Somehow, I had never thought that any such braving of the house’s law would be possible.

“I heard my father’s answer, but it conveyed no meaning to me.  I also realized that he spoke from a distance,—­that he was at one end of the room while we were at the other.  I was presently to have this idea confirmed, for while I was striving with all my might and main to subdue my very heart-throbs so that she would not hear me or suspect my presence, the darkness—­I should rather say the blackness of the place yielded to a flash of lightning—­ heat lightning, all glare and no sound—­and I caught an instantaneous vision of my father’s figure standing with gleaming things about him, which affected me at the moment as supernatural, but which, in later years, I decided to have been weapons hanging on a wall.

“She saw him too, for she gave a quick laugh and said they would not need any candles; and then, there was another flash and I saw something in his hand and something in hers, and though I did not yet understand, I felt myself turning deathly sick and gave a choking gasp which was lost in the rush she made into the centre of the room, and the keenness of her swift low cry.