Mindful more of the boyarine than of the Ugly One, Wilfrid stepped with noiseless tread.
“Your room,” said Nadia, as they ascended a staircase, “is exactly over the boyarine’s bed-chamber, so you must move about as silently as a ghost.”
Conversing thus in whispers she turned down the corridor that led from the second landing.
“This is your room,” she said, pausing before a closed door.
Wilfrid, taking the lamp from her hand, wished her “good night.”
“The last Englishman parted from me very differently.” There was no mistaking the saucy invitation of her eye and lip. Pretty faces were made to be kissed, and Wilfrid did what any other sensible fellow would have done similarly situated, in which pleasing business the lamp became accidentally extinguished.
“There now! You yourself must re-light it,” she said, thrusting a tinder-box into his hand. “I cannot stay longer,” and pushing him into the room, she closed the door upon him and hurried away.
Wilfrid’s first act on finding himself alone was to lock the door, his practice always at a strange inn; his next, the room being in total darkness, was to obtain a light, a somewhat difficult feat, owing to the dampness of the rag in the tinder-box. Not till after the lapse of ten minutes did he succeed in producing a flame sufficient for the rekindling of the lamp.
While kneeling on the floor at this task he more than once fancied that he caught a sound like a sigh, and at the moment of obtaining the light he became convinced of the reality of the sounds.