For a space, then, she disappeared. Having returned the rig to its quarters and having dined at the Gaunt House, the Major came forth once more at eight-thirty o'clock to return to the Kenilworth for a bout at the cards. He was spruced and for the second time that day he had shaved. Plainly his measured and customary habit of life was to go on just as it had gone on before the woman came--or, rather, it might be said that it was only now reassuming the routine which, with breaks in between, it had pursued through so many years. Major Foxmaster came down the steps, drawing on his gloves. From the deeper darkness beyond a patch of yellowish glow where a gas lamppost stood the woman emerged, appearing now as an uncertain, wavering shape in her black swathings. Again she followed him, at a distance of a few paces, to the Kenilworth Club; again she waited in the shadows cast by its old-fashioned portico while he played his game and, at its end, cashed in his winnings--for the Major won that night, as very often he did; again she followed him homeward at midnight through the silent and empty street. Without a word or a sign or a backward glance he ascended the steps and passed within the doors of the Gaunt House. Without a word or a sign she lingered until he had disappeared; then she turned off the pavement into the road and vanished, swimming away upright, as it were, without visible motion of her limbs or her body, into a stilled and waveless sea of darkness. I have here set down the story of this day with such detail because, with occasional small variations, it was to be the story of an uncounted number of other days coming after it. Inside of twenty-four hours the whole city knew the tale, and buzzed and hummed with it. Inside of forty-eight hours the woman, by common consent, had been given the names she was ever thereafter to wear. She was, to some, The Woman in Black; to others, Foxmaster's Shadow. Inside of a week or two the town was to know, by word of mouth passed on from this person to that, and by that person to another, all that it was ever to know of her.