Her eyes rested wistfully on the carved panels. Somewhere along the way the game had turned into deadly earnest. The owner of the room was no longer an exhilarating sort of jigsaw puzzle. He had become a person, somebody she desperately needed to find. Perhaps it was the gun. Perhaps it was his gay and entirely practical bathroom. Perhaps it was the picture of solemn little boys with a football, which held his childhood. Something had suddenly made him real, a human being, a man who smoked a pipe and read in bed—a man one could talk to and laugh with and depend on if one got frightened. Father didn’t count. Father was out of date and out of touch with the world. Aunt Effie didn’t count either. Aunt Effie was never frightened. That is, not about anything that mattered. But this man, who was still young, though he was used to guns, and had perhaps even seen the Sphinx face to face, and had read nearly everything—he could explain things, he could answer questions, and yet surely he could still remember the time when he too had wanted to know. . .

Her hand was on the latch of the wardrobe. A coat or two—possibly riding-clothes—a mackintosh—why should she want to see them? Men’s clothes were all alike....

One panel swung out toward her, then the other.

Exactly the sort of thing Father wore. Only—she lifted a coat sleeve and rubbed her fingers across it like a caress—for all its rough weave it was surprisingly soft. And from it came the faint, unmistakable scent of pipe smoke. She laid her cheek against it, and felt comforted. He would come back, his things were still here.

A pair of gray flannel trousers was folded neatly across the metal bar fastened inside one door. She slipped them off the bar and held them up against herself, the belt at her own waistline. About six inches of the bottoms lay along the floor at her feet. He was tall. With a grateful smile at a spot in the air six inches above her head, she folded the trousers across the bar again, and closed the wardrobe.

As she did so, a long shiver ran through her, and uneasiness like a cold draught pervaded the room. For a moment, leaning against the edge of the wardrobe, she looked about her, puzzled. She had put back everything, exactly as she found it. She had touched nothing a maid with a duster might not have fingered—except perhaps his clothes. She had committed no sacrilege, surely. But something was wrong. She felt sick and weak, the way she had felt after influenza. And the room was—different.

“What’s happened?” she whispered instinctively, as though the room could hear and answer. “What have I done?”