“Oh,” she answered, “I was only thinking; it _is_ the bare’s business, you know. That means that you can’t really get away from your past. It comes back again. Do you remember a French story called ‘Toutes les Amoureuses’? ... about a man who had hundreds of adventures. And of each lady he kept a ribbon or a lock of hair, or a shoe-buckle--some trifle. And once a year he used to lock his door and take out these odds and ends--and remember--just remember! Well, Mr. Dudley Leicester, that’s a good thing to do. It’s an act of piety for one thing; it averts evil for another. It’s like touching for the evil chance. If you’d done that for me--for my sake, because you had a good slice of my life--if you had done it ... well! you’d not have been so desperately unhappy now.” “I’m not unhappy,” he said, and he spoke the truth. “Aren’t you?” she mocked him. “Aren’t you?” They were within a few steps of her door, almost opposite where, black and silent, his own house awaited him--as if, reproachfully, it gazed at him with darkened eyes. And suddenly she burst into a carol, and with quickened steps she danced him onwards: “He called me a penguin, a penguin, a penguin; He called me a penguin a long time ago!” She sang it to the triumphant hit of “Voici le sabre!” And then they were on her doorstep. She had her key in the latch, the door went back into darkness. “I’ll prove to you you called me that,” she said, and crouching forward, as she had bent to open the door, she caught the end of his sleeve and pulled him into the inner darkness. He could see nothing, and the heavy door was closed behind him. PART II I AND suddenly, in the thick darkness, whirring as if it were a scream, intermitted for a moment and again commencing, a little bell rang out at Dudley Leicester’s elbow. As suddenly, but with a more gracious diffusion, light welled down from above his head, and Etta Hudson’s voice mingling with it: “Stop that confounded thing! I don’t want all the servants in the house to know you are here.” She leaned over the white and ormolu banisters: the light swinging over her head made a halo above her disordered hair; her white shoulders gleamed. “Stop it,” she said; “Don’t fumble so ridiculously. Don’t you know how to take the thing off the hooks?” She laughed at him derisively; her face disappeared as if she were about to continue her upward journey. Then once more she was looking down at him: “Tell whoever it is,” she said, “that Sir William is in Paris and Lady Hudson in bed. Say ‘sir’ when you speak, and they’ll think it’s the second footman, Moddle! Don’t you remember Moddle?” And again she laughed, and her ascent of the stairs was marked by the tips of her fingers, visible as if they were little white and creeping mice.