I had had the house built within an attractive garden by which it was set back a little way from the road. It was situated on the outskirts of a town to which I could go whenever I felt like a little social life. All my servants lived in a building some way off at the end of a vegetable garden surrounded by a high wall. So beautifully soothing to me was the dark enfolding of the night in the silence of my secluded home, nestling as it did under the leaves of the huge surrounding trees, that every evening I used to put off going to bed the longer to savour it.

This particular night, they were putting on a production of Sigurd1 at the local theatre. It was the first time I had heard this beautiful, fairytale opera and I enjoyed it enormously. I was walking happily home, my ears full of the lovely arias, in my mind’s eye seeing again the magical scenery. It was very, very dark indeed, so dark, in fact, that I could hardly see the road, and several times nearly fell into the ditch. From the tollgate to my house it’s about a kilometre, maybe more – in other words, about a twenty-minute gentle walk. It was between one and half past one in the morning. The sky cleared a little above me and the sad old crescent moon of the last quarter appeared. The new crescent moon, the one which rises at about four or five in the afternoon, is bright and cheerful like polished silver but the one rising after midnight is a dismal, reddish, rather gloomy one, a real Sabbath moon. Anybody with nocturnal habits will tell you that, I’m sure. The first, however slender, however threadlike, throws a shining brilliance that fills the heart with delight and casts sharp shadows on the earth. The last hardly sheds more than a dying glow and that so dull as to make hardly any shadow at all.

I could see in the distance the dense mass which was my garden when, out of nowhere, it seemed, a sort of unease began to creep over me at the thought of entering it. I slackened my pace. The air was balmy. The great clump of trees ahead looked like a tomb beneath which my house lay buried.