That same day, after lunch, the nurse left. I was getting on very well, and was to be allowed up toward the end of the week. In the afternoon Mrs. Carroll had gone out, and I found myself alone. I went on with “Huck,” but a chapter or two brought me to the end. I began another book, “Bevis,” but my eyes grew tired, and I let it drop on the bed beside me. As I lay idle I was seized by a desire to get up. I resisted it for a few minutes, and then I slid into a sitting posture, with my legs hanging over the side of the bed. It struck me that they had grown absurdly thin and long, and I felt wretchedly shaky. I stood up, all the same, holding on to the bedpost till I got accustomed to being on my feet, when I put on my dressing-gown, and walked somewhat uncertainly as far as the door. I turned the handle and looked out with a strange curiosity into the passage. It was as if I had been ill for months, it all somehow seemed so queer and new. The long high corridor, off which the rooms opened, was hung with tall portraits that appeared, in the mellow sunlight of high far windows, to watch me stiffly yet furtively. I liked them, I liked everything about the place, I liked to look down the passage with its long row of closed doors, which seemed so mysterious, reaching right on to the head of the staircase. I listened for footsteps, but heard nothing. Miss Dick probably was out, and the servants’ quarters were far away. I had a feeling that I was really the son of the house, that everything about it, its pictures, its ghosts, were mine. I went to my favourite picture and stood beneath it. It was a portrait of a lady with dark hair and dark blue eyes, and it was partly this peculiar contrast, I think, this contrast of blue eyes and black hair, that had originally pleased me. She was young and she had a strange quaint name――Prudence Carroll. The artist had painted her as if she were just come in from the garden, for she held still a bunch of flowers in her hand. She was standing by a queer little piano――or was it a spinet?――the spinet I had now in my room? It was open, and in a minute or two she would lay down her flowers and play some air on it, or the accompaniment of some forgotten ballad. Did the painter intend to show that these were the things she was fondest of――music and flowers? Poor Prudence Carroll had been dust these hundred years, the notes of her spinet were either cracked or dumb, and her tardy lover had arrived a century too late, for she had died unmarried, and but a year after this portrait was painted! Why had no one cared for her? Perhaps some day, between twilight and dusk, she would slip into my room and sing to me, “Rose softly Blooming,” or “Voi che sapete!” A rustle of muslin, a ghostly scent of ghostly flowers, the twangling notes of the spinet, and a voice singing a song that would sound thin and far off, like the sound of wind――that is how it would happen.