“Perhaps,” thought Stephen, “Judd means it as a joke. Well, he shall be fetched back tomorrow and made to put it right.”

Not knowing quite what else to do, Stephen went up to the ground floor and looked in every room; all were empty. And so he climbed the staircase to the first floor.

At the top of the staircase was a door which he had never seen before.

“Who’s there?” whispered a voice from behind the door. It was not a voice Stephen knew and, though it was only a whisper, it was curiously penetrating. It seemed to get into Stephen’s head by some other means than his ears.

“There is someone upon stairs!” insisted the whispering voice. “Is it the servant? Come here, if you please! I need you!”

Stephen knocked and went in.

The room was every bit as mysterious as the door. If anyone had asked Stephen to describe it, he would have said it was decorated in the Gothic style – this being the only explanation he could think of to account for its extraordinary appearance. But it had none of the usual Gothic embellishments such as one might see depicted in the pages of Mr Ackermann’s Repository of the Arts. There were no pointed mediaeval arches, no intricately carved wood, no ecclesiastical motifs. The walls and floor of the room were of plain grey stone, very worn and uneven in places. The ceiling was of vaulted stone. One small window looked out upon a starlit sky. The window had not so much as a scrap of glass in it and the winter wind blew into the room.

A pale gentleman with an extraordinary quantity of silvery, thistle-down hair was looking at his reflection in an old cracked mirror with an air of deep dissatisfaction. “Oh, there you are!” he said, glancing sourly at Stephen. “A person may call and call in this house, but no one comes!”

“I am very sorry, sir,” said Stephen, “but no one told me you were here.” He supposed the gentleman must be a guest of Sir Walter’s or Lady Pole’s – which explained the gentleman, but not the room. Gentlemen are often invited to stay in other people’s houses. Rooms hardly ever are.

“In what way may I serve you, sir?” asked Stephen.

“How stupid you are!” cried the gentleman with the thistledown hair. “Don’t you know that Lady Pole is to attend a ball tonight at my house? My own servant has run off and hidden himself somewhere. How can I appear by the side of the beautiful Lady Pole in this condition?”

The gentleman had cause for complaint: his face was unshaven, his curious hair was a mass of tangles and he was not dressed, but only wrapped in an old-fashioned powdering gown.

“I shall be with you in an instant, sir,” Stephen assured him. “But first I must find the means to shave you. You do not happen to know what your servant has done with the razor, I suppose?”