She put on her hat, and took it off again. She couldn’t have believed that anything could have made her look worse, but it did. She had rather fancied herself in it, but it was one of those bits of nonsense which depend on everything else being just so-a tilt here, a twist there, and exactly the right hair-do and make-up. Rather snappy when she started out, but now all it did was to make her look like a ghost the worst for drink. She crammed it into the pocket of her coat and sat back to wait for Jim Severn.

The empty silence of the house began to close in upon her. The little sounds which she had been making were at an end.

They had gone into the silence and the emptiness and been swallowed up. She began to think of all the times she had been alone in a house without minding it in the least. Why on earth should she mind now? The fact that the house was empty was neither here nor there. Sofas and tables and chairs, and a carpet on the floor-there is really nothing about these to make you feel safe. If there were a carpet on this stair, it would be a little less hard to sit on, but that was all. If she knew that she had only to cross the hall, open a door, and come into a comfortable furnished room, she would not be any more secure than she was at this moment. She was, of course, perfectly secure. The door was locked, and no one could get in without the key which was on Jim Severn’s ring. There was no one but herself in the house.

There was silence, and emptiness, and cold. And now the silence began fantastically to quiver, as if there was a pressure upon it and it might be going to break. Ione pulled her thought up sharply. This, at least, she knew for what it was, a thing out of nursery days when she would lie awake at the top of a tall old house and wait for the everydayness about her to splinter and let through all the terrors of a child’s imagination-thin sliding shadows and broad rolling ones-things that bounced and were suddenly not there any more-things that lurked and made faces at you just out of sight.