Rachaela sat for an hour before the dining-room fire. No one entered. She spent ten minutes in the drawing room, where the golden clock kept silence. It had no hands.

No one entered any of the rooms. It seemed to Rachaela that through the dregs of the afternoon no one had passed along the passage outside her door.

Michael, who alone had served her at dinner, had now vanished.

The house mewed and tossed like a tree in the rain and rising wind. It might now have been empty, but for herself.

Rachaela returned upstairs. She went to the bathroom and prepared herself for bed. In the bedroom, she sat in one of the nightdresses before the fire. Outside the unruly weather sounded like a storm at sea. She heard the ocean itself rolling in on the land.

Rachaela took a book and tried to read.

She read the same paragraph over and over.

The clock with the angels told her it was one o’clock: it was midnight.

Rachaela got into bed.

For an hour she tried to sleep.

Beyond the wall and the window the storm of wind increased. The corners of the house shrieked and the glass was lashed by metal splinters of rain.

If the lightning began it would be impossible to sleep. A pallid flash, the picture of Eve and Lucifer and the viridian tree imprinted themselves on the room.

On such a night...

Rachaela left the bed, She lit the lamp, dressed, powdered her face and crayoned in her eyes. Her black lashes cast shadows on her face, her mouth had a red ripe colour in the lamplight. It was the time for it.

As before, she carried the lamp out with her, and as before the passage was in darkness and all the carvings of fruit dipped and swerved. She was afraid of meeting the abnormal cat, but this nervousness did not dissuade her.

She went to the left and followed the corridor to its branch, went left again and found Salome leaden in the dark.

Spiders clung on the narrow stair down, catching the light in their filigree webs.

In the lower corridor the lamp glowed steadily, the ranked doors passed, and the other door manifested like a black oblong. Was this, too, locked?

She came to it and without pausing tried the doorknob, which turned obligingly.

As in the dream, inside was only blackness.

Was he asleep, the one who lived here, lying in the sea of black while the storm roared about him? That would be justice, coming on him like Psyche on the monster in the legend, letting fall the scalding drop of oil from the lamp. But Rachaela would not be so careless. If she found him sleeping perhaps that would put the balance right.

The light found a stair inside the tower, and Rachaela mounted it slowly.

There was a faint reddish film above, the shade of a low-burning fire.