“And that’s Louie Gregory all over, if it’s the last word I spoke. And her mother the same before her. So long as there’s someone else to do a thing you won’t never need to do it yourself-that’s the way they looked at it, and that’s the way they acted it out. Whether it was borrowing sugar and forgetting to pay it back, or leaving you to bath the baby whilst they had a nice comfortable faint on their beds, that was them!”

Old Mr. Masters looked up with a twinkling eye.

“Been bathing the baby, Sarah?”

Mrs. Masters’ cheeks, already flushed with vexation and fatigue, became a rich shade of plum. She stared angrily at her father-in-law.

“More fool me!” she said. “And washed up the dinner things which no one hadn’t thought to do, and given the children their tea which they was crying for, and cleared up the worst of the muck in the house! And that poor fool of a Louie setting there crying over her finger!”

“What do ’ee do it for?” said old Mr. Masters.

Sarah Masters was slapping plates together as she cleared the table.

“Because I’m a fool, I suppose! Go on-tell me so!”

Old Mr. Masters told her so with a sardonic chuckle, adding as a crowning insult that she’d got too soft a heart and it would get her into trouble one of these days if she didn’t look out. After which she banged out of the room, and could be heard clattering plates and dishes in the scullery.

Peter went back to his room and tried to write. It was not a great success. His pen travelled, but just what part of his mind prompted it, he did not know. Not a very intelligent part, because when he came to read over what he had written it didn’t seem to mean anything at all. Thomasina’s name had got into it twice. When he had torn it up and started all over again he did manage to keep some control over what went down on the paper. And at the end of it a duller lot of tripe he had never read in his life. It joined the other torn pages in the wastepaper basket. If he couldn’t get away from thinking about Thomasina he had better do it in an orderly and intelligent manner. To start with, what was he in such a stew about? It wasn’t the first time they had quarrelled, and it wouldn’t be the last. It wasn’t the quarrel that was worrying him.

Well then, what was it? The moment he began to think about it he knew very well what it was. He had taken up the attitude of the confirmed sceptic in this matter of Anna Ball, but there was just a chance that there was something in it. Girls did get murdered, and Anna was just the aggravating kind who might have asked for it and got it. And if she had-then there was no saying what kind of a mess Thomasina might land in. He didn’t like Deepe House, with its rickety bomb-damaged rooms and its boarded-up windows. If it wasn’t anything else it was probably insanitary. He didn’t like old Mr. Masters’ story about the Everly sisters. Like a surprisingly large number of people, he didn’t believe in haunted houses, but he didn’t like them. They linked up with old horrible things that ought to be forgotten. And at this point he knew very well what was making him afraid. It was the idea of Thomasina going off by herself on some crazy search for Anna Ball in that old dilapidated house.

He remembered what she had said about the cellars. Suppose she took it into her head to go looking for Anna Ball in that crazy place in the dark. She was certainly capable of it. She was angry, she was stubborn, and quite disastrously brave. And she might stumble into almost anything, from a hole in the floor to whatever it was that had sent old Mr. Masters’ tramp running hell-for-leather down the drive yelling his head off.

A picture came up in his mind, small but horribly vivid-not Thomasina riding her high horse, proud, angry, sure of herself, but a girl with all the courage scared out of her screaming in the dark. He looked at his watch. It was twenty minutes past eleven. He had been too long over his writing, over his thoughts. Anything might have happened, or be happening now, up there at Deepe House. Here the Masters were in bed and asleep, old Mr. Masters by nine o’clock, and Sarah as soon as she had finished her angry clattering and clearing up. He opened the window, hung by his hands from the sill, and dropped. Since the downstair rooms were a bare eight foot from ceiling to floor, it was easy enough, and when it came to getting in again-well, he thought he wouldn’t be the first to use the old pear tree as a ladder.

The night was damp and chill but not really cold. He had no plan except to go up to the Miss Tremletts and see whether any light burned there or not. He had no further thought or purpose, and it came to him that it was a senseless one, because if the windows were all dark, it might mean that Thomasina was in bed and asleep, or it might mean that she was out and away. And if there was a light in her window, it could mean that she was awake. She could be reading in bed. She could be doing any one of the things you do when you don’t want to go to sleep. Or she could be out in the dark, with the light left in her window to guide her home.

He came up to the cottage and found all the front of it dark. What had been the stable yard now had a little paling round it painted green, and a gate with one of those fancy latches which are equally difficult to open or shut. It was shut when Peter came up to it, and he made a bad job of getting it open, pinching his fingers and swearing under his breath. Inside, most of the cobblestones had been left, but some square beds had been dug and filled with bulbs. In the dark they were soggy traps through which you blundered.

When he got round to the back, there were three lots of windows, and only one of them showed a light. The dark windows looked as if they were open, but the lighted window was shut, which meant that somebody was up, since you don’t open your window on a January night until you are ready to dive into bed and pull the clothes about you.

Well then, someone was up. But there was nothing to say that it was Thomasina. It might be Gwyneth, or it might be Elaine. And Thomasina out of the house and well away on a fool’s errand! He stood looking at the window and fighting down a rising fury and a rising fear.

There are states of mind in which time flies, and others in which it lags. Peter hadn’t the slightest idea how long he had stood looking up at the light filtering through curtains which gave it a blueish tinge, when he suddenly felt that he wasn’t doing any good. If Thomasina was here she was all right. But if she wasn’t here she was up at Deepe House, and the best thing he could do was to go and find her.

He blundered into another flower bed, shut the gate without bothering about the latch, and set off in the direction of the house. He had a torch, but he didn’t want to use it, and once away from the cottage, the path lay across the open park and was not really hard to keep. The mass of Deepe House showed up against the sky, first as mere density, then as a black rectangle with its two wings foreshortened.

He came into the courtyard between the wings and stopped to look and listen. Here it was absolutely dark, the skyline lost. And absolutely still. Not a breath, not a whisper, not the slightest, smallest sound. Since he had seen the place by day, he knew that the windows to the right were curtained and those on the left boarded-up. While straight ahead-now there he couldn’t remember whether the whole front was eyeless, every window nailed up against wind and weather, or whether here and there there was still glass in some of the windows.

He moved across the courtyard, his hands out before him. There was a door-he remembered that there was a door with some kind of canopy over it. Yes, that was it, a canopy with pillars. His hand touched one of them and felt a cold slime upon it. There were two steps, smooth and shallow, and beyond the steps a heavy door. He remembered seeing it in the daylight, with a scar on it where the knocker had been wrenched away, he supposed for salvage. His left hand found the place and felt it now. Quite a deep hole where a nail had been driven in. The nail, the scar, just touched his thought and was flung off it by the sudden realization that the surface he was touching was a slanting one. It should have been flat, and it wasn’t flat. It should have been steady, and it wasn’t steady. It slanted and it moved. The door was ajar.