She paused, partly perhaps to enjoy the dramatic effect of her announcement. ‘Well, if it wasn’t our Thomas! Only you couldn’t have recognized him, poor beast, his head was bashed in that cruel.’

‘Thomas!’ said the cook. ‘Why he was here only an hour ago.’

‘That’s what I said to Miss Winthrop. “Why, he was in the kitchen only an hour ago,” and then I came over funny, and when she asked me to help her clean the mess up I couldn’t, not if my life depended on it. But I don’t feel like that now,’ she ended inconsequently. ‘I’ll go back and do it!’ She collected her traps and departed.

‘Thomas!’ muttered Rundle. ‘Who could have wished the poor beast any harm? Now I remember, Mr. Fairfield did ask me to get him out a clean shirt. . . . I’d better go up and ask him.’

He found Antony in evening dress seated at the writing-table. He had stripped it of writing materials and the light from two candles gleamed on its polished surface. Opposite to him on the other side of the table was an empty chair. He was sitting with his back to the room; his face, when he turned it at Rundle’s entrance, was blotchy and looked terribly tired.

‘I decided to dine here after all, Rundle,’ he said. Rundle saw that the Bovril was still untouched in his cup.

‘Why, your supper’ll get cold, Mr. Fairfield,’ he said.

‘Mind your own business,’ said Antony. ‘I’m waiting.’

The Empire clock on the drawing-room chimney-piece began to strike, breaking into a conversation which neither at dinner nor afterwards had been more than desultory.

‘Eleven,’ said Mr. Ampleforth. ‘The nurse will be here any time now. She ought to be grateful to you, Ronald, for getting him into bed.’

‘I didn’t enjoy treating Antony like that,’ said Ronald.

There was a silence.

‘What was that?’ asked Maggie suddenly.

‘It sounded like the motor.’

‘Might have been,’ said Mr. Ampleforth. ‘You can’t tell from here.’

They strained their ears, but the rushing sound had already died away. ‘Eileen’s gone to bed, Maggie,’ said Mrs. Ampleforth. ‘Why don’t you? We’ll wait up for the nurse, and tell you when she comes.’

Rather reluctantly Maggie agreed to go.

She had been in her bedroom about ten minutes, and was feeling too tired to take her clothes off, when there came a knock at the door. It was Eileen.

‘Maggie,’ she said, ‘the nurse has arrived. I thought you’d like to know.’

‘Oh, how kind of you,’ said Maggie. ‘They were going to tell me, but I expect they forgot. Where is she?’

‘In Antony’s room. I was coming from the bath and his door was open.’

‘Did she look nice?’

‘I only saw her back.’

‘I think I’ll go along and speak to her,’ said Maggie.

‘Yes, do. I don’t think I’ll go with you.’

As she walked along the passage Maggie wondered what she would say to the nurse. She didn’t mean to offer her professional advice. But even nurses are human, and Maggie didn’t want this stranger to imagine that Antony was, well, always like that—the spoilt, tiresome, unreasonable creature of the last few hours. She could find no harsher epithets for him, even after all his deliberate unkindness. The woman would probably have heard that Maggie was his fiancée; Maggie would try to show her that she was proud of the relationship and felt it an honour.

The door was still open so she knocked and walked in. But the figure that uncoiled itself from Antony’s pillow and darted at her a look of malevolent triumph was not a nurse, nor was her face strange to Maggie; Maggie could see, so intense was her vision at that moment, just what strokes Antony had used to transform her own portrait into Lady Elinor’s. She was terrified, but she could not bear to see Antony’s rather long hair nearly touching the floor nor the creature’s thin hand on his labouring throat. She advanced, resolved at whatever cost to break up this dreadful tableau. She approached near enough to realize that what seemed a strangle-hold was probably a caress, when Antony’s eyes rolled up at her and words, frothy and toneless like a chain of bursting bubbles, came popping from the corner of his swollen mouth: ‘Get out, damn you!’ At the same moment she heard the stir of presences behind her and a voice saying, ‘Here is the patient, nurse; I’m afraid he’s half out of bed, and here’s Maggie, too. What have you been doing to him, Maggie?’ Dazed, she turned about. ‘Can’t you see?’ she cried; but she might have asked the question of herself, for when she looked back she could only see the tumbled bed, the vacant pillow, and Antony’s hair trailing the floor.

The nurse was a sensible woman. Fortified by tea, she soon bundled everybody out of the room. A deeper quiet than night ordinarily brings invaded the house. The reign of illness had begun.

A special embargo was laid on Maggie’s visits. The nurse said she had noticed that Miss Winthrop’s presence agitated the patient. But Maggie extracted a promise that she should be called if Antony got worse. She was too tired and worried to sleep, even if she had tried to, so she sat up fully dressed in a chair, every now and then trying to allay her anxiety by furtive visits to Antony’s bedroom door.

The hours passed on leaden feet. She tried to distract herself by reading the light literature with which her hostess had provided her. Though she could not keep her attention on the books, she continued to turn their pages, for only so could she keep at bay the conviction that had long been forming at the back of her mind and that now threatened to engulf her whole consciousness: the conviction that the legend about Low Threshold was true. She was neither hysterical nor superstitious, and for a moment she had managed to persuade herself that what she had seen in Antony’s room was an hallucination. The passing hours robbed her of that solace. Antony was the victim of Lady Elinor’s vengeance. Everything pointed to it: the circumstances of her appearance, the nature of Antony’s illness, the horrible deterioration in his character—to say nothing of the drawings, and the cat.

There were only two ways of saving him. One was to get him out of the house; she had tried that and failed; if she tried again she would fail more signally than before. But there remained the other way.

The old book about The Tragicall Happenings at Low Threshold Hall still reposed in a drawer; for the sake of her peace of mind Maggie had vowed not to take it out, and till now she had kept her vow. But as the sky began to pale with the promise of dawn and her conviction of Antony’s mortal danger grew apace, her resolution broke down.

‘Whereby we must conclude,’ she read, ‘that the Lady Elinor, like other Apparitions, is subject to certain Lawes. One, to abandon her Victim and seeking another tenement enter into it and transfer her vengeance, should its path be crossed by a Body yet nearer Dissolution. . . .’

A knock, that had been twice repeated, startled her out of her reverie.

‘Come in!’

‘Miss Winthrop,’ said the nurse, ‘I’m sorry to tell you the patient is weaker. I think the doctor had better be telephoned for.’

‘I’ll go and get someone,’ said Maggie. ‘Is he much worse?’

‘Very much, I’m afraid.’

Maggie had no difficulty in finding Rundle; he was already up.

‘What time is it, Rundle?’ she asked. ‘I’ve lost count.’

‘Half-past four, miss.’ He looked very sorry for her.

‘When will the doctor be here?’

‘In about an hour, miss, not more.’

Suddenly she had an idea. ‘I’m so tired, Rundle, I think I shall try to get some sleep. Tell them not to call me unless . . . unless . . .’

‘Yes, miss,’ said Rundle. ‘You look altogether done up.’

About an hour! So she had plenty of time. She took up the book again. ‘Transfer her vengeance . . . seeking another tenement . . . a Body nearer Dissolution.’ Her idle thoughts turned with compassion to the poor servant girl whose death had spelt recovery to Lord Deadham’s cousin but been so little regarded: ‘the night was spent’ before they heard that she was dead. Well, this night was spent already. Maggie shivered. ‘I shall die in my sleep,’ she thought. ‘But shall I feel her come?’ Her tired body sickened with nausea at the idea of such a loathsome violation. But the thought still nagged at her. ‘Shall I realize even for a moment that I’m changing into . . . into?’ Her mind refused to frame the possibility. ‘Should I have time to do anyone an injury?’ she wondered. ‘I could tie my feet together with a handkerchief; that would prevent me from walking.’ Walking . . . walking. . . . The word let loose on her mind a new flood of terrors. She could not do it! She could not lay herself open for ever to this horrible occupation! Her tormented imagination began to busy itself with the details of her funeral; she saw mourners following her coffin into the church. But Antony was not amongst them; he was better but too ill to be there. He could not understand why she had killed herself, for the note she had left gave no hint of the real reason, referred only to continual sleeplessness and nervous depression. So she would not have his company when her body was committed to the ground. But that was a mistake; it would not be her body, it would belong to that other woman and be hers to return to by the right of possession.