y on that ledge in case of his
need. Ridiculous, of course, to expect a candlestick to be still there!
Times change so. But she felt for it, and there it was, and the matches
too! She lit the candle. The dim scene thus revealed seemed strange enough
to her after the electricity of the Hotel du Danube and of the yacht. It
made her want to cry....

She was one of those people who have room in their minds for all sorts of
things at once. And thus she could simultaneously be worried to an extreme
about Jane Foley, foolish and sad about her immensely distant childhood,
and even regretful that she had admitted the fraudulence of the
wedding-ring on her hand. On the last point she had a very strong sense of
failure and disillusion. When she had first donned a widow's bonnet she had
meant to have wondrous adventures and to hear marvellous conversations as a
widow. And what had she done with her widowhood after all? Nothing. She
could not but think that she ought to have kept it a little longer, on the
chance....

Aguilar made a practice of sleeping in the kitchen; he considered that a
house could only be well guarded at night from the ground floor. There was
his bed, in the corner against the brush and besom cupboard, all made up.
Its creaselessness, so characteristic of Aguilar, had not been disturbed.
The sight of the narrow bed made Audrey think what a strange existence was
the existence of Aguilar. ... Then, with a boldness that was half bluster,
she went upstairs, and the creaking of the woodwork was affrighting.

"Jane! Jane, dear!" she called out, as she arrived at the second-storey
landing. The sound of her voice was uncanny in the haunted stillness. All
Audrey's infancy floated up the well of the stairs and wrapped itself round
her and tightened her throat. She went along the passage to the door of the
tank-room.

"Jane, Jane!"

No answer! The door was locked. She listened. She put her ear against the
door in order to catch the faintest sound of life within. But she could
only hear the crude, sharp ticking of the cheap clock which, as she knew,
Aguilar had supplied to Jane Foley. The vision of Jane lying unconscious or
dead obsessed her. Then she thrust it away and laughed at it. Assuredly
Aguilar and Jane must have received some alarm as to a reappearance of the
police; they must have fled while there had yet been time. Where could they
have gone? Of course, through the garden and plantation and down to the
sea-w