t 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 ot