At night Anna and Stephan had reappeared in the drawing room. They behaved as if nothing were different, yet Anna especially bore the look of a cream-fed cat. They were pleased with her. Their whole manner was congratulatory. She asked them nothing.

Camillo she did not see. The others only briefly, as they flitted about.

After seven days and nights she went one afternoon to the tower door by way of the backstairs and ominous corridor. The door was locked. She rapped and no one answered. An almost violent rage overtook her; she had been diffident, nearly ashamed.

On the eighth evening, after dinner, she found the enormous cat in the hall, scratching at the lower tower door. A bright spurt shot through her. She went to the cat, and smoothed its head. The fur was savage and full of electricity, but the cat did not show displeasure.

‘Shut out,’ she said, but she tried the door. Always previously fastened against the house, now it gave. The cat snaked through, and Rachaela followed. Two closed doors flanked the stairwell, which she had not the extra temerity to touch. She ascended to the landing where the second door was placed, and so up into the wide upper room of the piano. The lion window rose dark and barren, but a lamp burned now on the piano’s top, another on the mantelpiece. The fire was high, and there on the table lay the remains of an eaten dinner. Adamus had left all this evidence but was himself absent.

The cat stalked to the fireside and lay down familiarly.

Rachaela sat at the piano and walked her fingers gingerly over its keys.

Adamus did not come into the room and after perhaps an hour, Rachaela vacated it. The cat slept by the fire.

She did not see Adamus for fifteen days and nights. She tried both doors on three further occasions, to find them locked.

It occurred to her that he was as afraid of her as she of him.

She wanted never to go near him again, but was drawn as if by a golden rope.

One morning brought a typewritten envelope under her door. She had been addressed as Ms R. Smith. This tone of lightness made her bristle, as if he mocked her. At first she did not open the letter, the only mail she was likely to receive in the house of the Scarabae. Finally she did so.

‘Rachaela—I smelled your scent in the room. One long black curling hair was on the piano. Something from your mother after all, the slight curl in your hair. A visit, and I wasn’t there. Come today in the afternoon. What would you like? Chopin? Prokofiev? Ravel? I’ll expect you.’

This time he had signed himself ‘Adam’. The letter was false, but inviting.

She was like a schoolgirl who had played truant from school—sickly excited, her heart beating.