"When did all this happen?"
She shook her head blankly. "I don't remember the time. At close on four o'clock, I should think; I looked at the clock afterwards. That was my room you saw me come out of. Something woke me up; I'm not sure what. But then I heard somebody fumbling at my door and pawing at the knob. Like — like a big dog. I suppose I keep thinking of dogs because Tempest barked so much early last night, and I heard him howling again this morning.
"But this was at my door. Then I heard a sound like a fall, and somebody running. I didn't dare move, until I heard Jervis Willard's voice speaking out there. He'd heard some noise, and come out in the hall and turned on the light to see what it was. When I opened my door he was lifting up Louise in a faint."
Bennett said rather irritably: "Why the devil was she wandering around in the dark at four o'clock in the morning?"
"I'm not sure. She hasn't been very coherent since. I think she was coming to my room; she hadn't been asleep all night, and she was rather hysterical already. I suppose when she got out of her own room she wasn't able to find the light-switch, and got lost and worse frightened because she couldn't find her way either back or to me. I know she has kept saying, `Lights, lights! " Katharine Bohun stared straight ahead, her hands clenched in her lap. "Were you ever awfully frightened by thinking you were lost in a maze in the dark, and you'd never get to where you wanted to go? I've been. In dreams, sometimes."
He leaned forward suddenly and took her by the shoulders. He said:
"I'm very fond of ghost stories and the morbid kind. That's because I've never run up against anything really morbid in my own life. But you're not to get frightened by a lot of damned shadows and nonsense, do you hear? You've had too much of it."
"I say, what on earth-"
"What you need is to walk out of this forsaken house with its cold hot water pitchers and its cockeyed mirrors and its moth-eaten ghosts. You need to make straight for London or Paris, preferably Paris, and fly off on a bender that would knock the unholy watch-springs out of anything you'd ever imagined. You need to wallow in dress-makers' shops and red plush hotels; you need to hear bands and have a dizzy love-affair and get sozzled in every bar round the Place de Clichy; you need to see the Chinese lanterns on the lake in the Bois, and dance at the Chateau de Madrid in a postage-stamp of a dress, and see the chafing-dishes steam and the color of Burgundy while you're jammed up in a crazy little room that's served the best in the world for two hundred years. You need to see the chestnut-trees coming out in spring on the Champs Elysees, and taste onion soup down in the markets by the river when it's just getting daylight; you need.."
He had pitched diplomacy clear out of the window. He had got up and was waving one arm in the air during the fervor of the moment. Now the balloon collapsed as he realized he must be making a fool of himself. He saw again the bleak room, the windows looking out on snow. But he was surprised at the vividness and intensity of Katharine Bohun's face. She looked up at him.