“Let me stay in your dressing-room, Miss Rachel,” she begged.  “If you don’t, I’ll sit in the hall outside the door.  I’m not going to be murdered with my eyes shut.”

“If you’re going to be murdered,” I retorted, “it won’t make any difference whether they are shut or open.  But you may stay in the dressing-room, if you will lie on the couch:  when you sleep in a chair you snore.”

She was too far gone to be indignant, but after a while she came to the door and looked in to where I was composing myself for sleep with Drummond’s Spiritual Life.

“That wasn’t a woman, Miss Rachel,” she said, with her shoes in her hand.  “It was a man in a long coat.”

“What woman was a man?” I discouraged her without looking up, and she went back to the couch.

It was eleven o’clock when I finally prepared for bed.  In spite of my assumption of indifference, I locked the door into the hall, and finding the transom did not catch, I put a chair cautiously before the door—­it was not necessary to rouse Liddy—­ and climbing up put on the ledge of the transom a small dressing-mirror, so that any movement of the frame would send it crashing down.  Then, secure in my precautions, I went to bed.

I did not go to sleep at once.  Liddy disturbed me just as I was growing drowsy, by coming in and peering under the bed.  She was afraid to speak, however, because of her previous snubbing, and went back, stopping in the doorway to sigh dismally.

Somewhere down-stairs a clock with a chime sang away the hours—­ eleven-thirty, forty-five, twelve.  And then the lights went out to stay.  The Casanova Electric Company shuts up shop and goes home to bed at midnight:  when one has a party, I believe it is customary to fee the company, which will drink hot coffee and keep awake a couple of hours longer.  But the lights were gone for good that night.  Liddy had gone to sleep, as I knew she would.  She was a very unreliable person:  always awake and ready to talk when she wasn’t wanted and dozing off to sleep when she was.  I called her once or twice, the only result being an explosive snore that threatened her very windpipe—­then I got up and lighted a bedroom candle.

My bedroom and dressing room were above the big living-room on the first floor.  On the second floor a long corridor ran the length of the house, with rooms opening from both sides.  In the wings were small corridors crossing the main one—­the plan was simplicity itself.  And just as I got back into bed, I heard a sound from the east wing, apparently, that made me stop, frozen, with one bedroom slipper half off, and listen.  It was a rattling metallic sound, and it reverberated along the empty halls like the crash of doom.  It was for all the world as if something heavy, perhaps a piece of steel, had rolled clattering and jangling down the hard-wood stairs leading to the card-room.

In the silence that followed Liddy stirred and snored again.  I was exasperated:  first she kept me awake by silly alarms, then when she was needed she slept like Joe Jefferson, or Rip,—­they are always the same to me.  I went in and aroused her, and I give her credit for being wide awake the minute I spoke.