The Argosy | Page 9

here was a capital opportunity for studying the customs of my little
burghers by night. I stole up the staircase with my candle, and waited
for the clock to strike. It struck, and out came the little figures as usual.
"Perhaps they only came because they saw my light," I said to myself. I
felt that the question as to their mode of procedure in the dark was still
an unsettled one.
But scarcely had the clock finished striking when I was disturbed by
the shutting of a door downstairs. Fearing that someone was coming,
and that the light might betray me, I blew out my candle and waited to
hear more. But all was silent in the house. I turned to go down, but as I
did so, I saw with astonishment that a thin streak of light shone from
under the black door. I stood like one petrified. Was there anyone
inside the room? Listening intently, I waited for full five minutes
without stirring a limb. Silence the most profound upstairs and down.
Stepping on tiptoe, I went back to my room, shut myself in, and crept
gladly into bed.
Next night my curiosity overmastered my fear. As soon as Dance was

gone I crept upstairs in the dark. One peep was enough. As on the
previous night, a thin streak of light shone from under the black
door--evidence that it was lighted up inside. Next night, and for several
nights afterwards, I put the same plan in operation with precisely the
same result. The light was always there.
Having my attention thus concentrated as it were upon this one room,
and lying awake so many hours when I ought to have been asleep, my
suspicions gradually merged into certainty that it was visited every
midnight by someone who came and went so lightly and quietly that
only by intently listening could I distinguish the exact moment of their
passing my door. Who was this visitor that came and went so
mysteriously? To discover this, without being myself discovered, was a
matter that required both tact and courage, but it was one on which I
was almost as much a monomaniac as a child well can be. To have
opened my door when the landing was perfectly dark would have been
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