her 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 ten minutes later I could just distinguish her smothered
footfall as she came down. I heard the door at the bottom of the
corridor shut behind her, and then I knew that I was safe.

Slipping out of bed, I stole, barefooted as I was, out of my bed-room
and up the flight of stairs which led to the black door. Of ghosts in
the ordinary meaning of that word--in the meaning which it has for five
children out of six--I had no fear; my fears, such as they were, ran in
quite another groove. I went upstairs slowly, with shut eyes, counting
each stair as I put my feet on it from one up to ten. I knew that from
the tenth stair the streak of light, if there, would be visible. On the
tenth stair I opened my eyes. There was the thread of light shining
clear and steady under the black door. For a minute I stood looking at
it. In the intense silence the beating of my heart was painfully
audible. Grasping the banister with one hand, I went downstairs
backwards, step by step, and so regained the sanctuary of my own room.

I scarcely know in what terms to describe, or how to make sufficiently
clear, the strange sort of fascination there was for me in those nightly
rambles--in living perpetually on the edge of a mystery. While daylight
lasted the feeling slumbered within me; I could even take myself to task
for wanting to pry into a secret that evidently in nowise concerned me.
But as soon as twilight set in, and night's shadows began to creep
timidly out of their corners, so surely could I feel the spell working
within me, the desire creeping over me to pluck out the heart of the
mystery that lay hidden behind the black nail-studded door upstairs.
Sometimes I climbed the staircase at one hour, sometimes at another; but
there was no real sleep for me, nothing but