it
a postern, which I pushed and found to be open. Bidding the driver wait
for me I passed within.

I went up a flight of steps, under Ionic pillars, to the double hall
door. I found that that, too, stood open, and I went into the hall,
which was very dark despite the June sunshine without. It was an
imposing hall paved with black and white marble, and the stairs
ascending from it were of the same material. I was struck by the
beautiful stucco work of the walls and ceiling. But dust and grime lay
on everything and the air of the place struck cold.

I went back to the hall door and rang the bell, which echoed somewhere
down in the lower regions of the house; but there was not a sound except
that.

I rang again, and still no result, and the influence of the shut-up and
abandoned house with all its shadows and memories began to chill me. I
set the hall door open wide, and then I found the door at the back of
the hall that led to the servants' quarters and opened that.

A rush of cold, damp air came up in my face with a mouldering smell.

"Bridget Kelly!" I called. "Bridget Kelly!"

The sound echoed as though through many vaults of stone and there was no
answer.

The place and the silence began to get on my nerves. I remembered its
forty-six rooms, all shut up and the furniture swathed in holland where
the rooms were not empty. I have always had a dread of an empty house,
and now it seized upon me. I could have run away out into the sunshine
to the cabman whom I had left feeding his horse. When I had looked back
before entering he and his horse had been the only living things in the
black street.

But I would not run away. It would be a pretty thing to go home to my
grandmother and tell her that I was afraid of the house because I could
not make Bridget Kelly hear me and had run away in the full sunshine of
a June day.

Probably Bridget was upstairs in some one of the forty-six rooms.

From the hall itself four doors of very fine wine-red mahogany opened. I
looked into one after the other. They were reception-rooms of great
size, so far as I could judge; but the sun was the other side of the
house, and only an eastern light came in through the chinks of the
window shutters. The rooms were full of sheeted shapes in the dimness. I
don't think I could have brought myself to go into them. I know I closed
each door with a hasty bang, as though it had been a Blue Beard's
Chamber.

As I went upstairs my heels made a