The upper corridors of the great sleeping house were brightly lit; on her way to me she had turned on every electric switch her hand could reach; and as we passed the final flight of stairs to the floor below, I heard a door shut softly and knew that Mabel had been listening—­waiting for us.  I led my sister up to it.  She knocked, and the door was opened cautiously an inch or so.  The room was pitch black.  I caught no glimpse of Mabel standing there.  Frances turned to me with a hurried whisper, “Billy, you will be careful, won’t you?” and went in.  I just had time to answer that I would not be long, and Frances to reply, “You’ll find us here” when the door closed and cut her sentence short before its end.

But it was not alone the closing door that took the final words.  Frances—­by the way she disappeared I knew it—­had made a swift and violent movement into the darkness that was as though she sprang.  She leaped upon that other woman who stood back among the shadows, for, simultaneously with the clipping of the sentence, another sound was also stopped—­stifled, smothered, choked back lest I should also hear it.  Yet not in time.  I heard it—­a hard and horrible sound that explained both the leap and the abrupt cessation of the whispered words.

I stood irresolute a moment.  It was as though all the bones had been withdrawn from my body, so that I must sink and fall.  That sound plucked them out, and plucked out my self-possession with them.  I am not sure that it was a sound I had ever heard before, though children, I half remembered, made it sometimes in blind rages when they knew not what they did.  In a grown-up person certainly I had never known it.  I associated it with animals rather—­horribly.  In the history of the world, no doubt, it has been common enough, alas, but fortunately today there can be but few who know it, or would recognize it even when heard.  The bones shot back into my body the same instant, but red-hot and burning; the brief instant of irresolution passed; I was torn between the desire to break down the door and enter, and to run—­run for my life from a thing I dared not face.

Out of the horrid tumult, then, I adopted neither course.  Without reflection, certainly without analysis of what was best to do for my sister, myself or Mabel, I took up my action where it had been interrupted.  I turned from the awful door and moved slowly towards the head of the stairs.

But that dreadful little sound came with me.  I believe my own teeth chattered.  It seemed all over the house—­in the empty halls that opened into the long passages towards the music-room, and even in the grounds outside the building.  From the lawns and barren garden, from the ugly terraces themselves, it rose into the night, and behind it came a curious driving sound, incomplete, unfinished, as of wailing for deliverance, the wailing of desperate souls in anguish, the dull and dry beseeching of hopeless spirits in prison.