Perhaps my mother's fear had grounds we children never knew. But we knew that the sound of a door shut, and a bolt shot, was music in her ears. Her changed "home" face was like summer come again. She would help us to strip off our wraps, and, all in a glow, we would go flying to the haven of our pretty fire-bright room with its gay chintzes, its lamps and flowers. One of us would ring for tea; another would draw chairs about the blaze. My mother's part was to close the heavy inside shutters, to let down across the panels the iron bar, and draw the curtains. "_Now_ we are safe and sound!" she would say. I do not pretend to explain, for I do not know how it was that, though we loved our walks, Bettina and I came to share her sense of danger. In the beginning we may have felt the flight home to be merely a kind of game. A playing at Prisoner's Base with the threshold of Duncombe House for goal. When we reached there (and only in the nick of time!) we had escaped our enemy, whether Colonel Dover or another. We had won. We had barred him out. That feeling lasted warm, triumphant, until bed-time. Then, heavy wooden shutters, even with iron all across, were no avail. Another enemy, craftier, deadlier than any that might haunt the heath at dusk, had got into the house. He was in hiding all the cheerful part of evening, when lights and voices were about. At bed-time, in dim passages, you felt his breath on the back of your neck. He never faced you. Always he was behind you. But he was never at his deadliest while you had your shoes and stockings on. He waited behind curtains or under the bed, to clutch at your bare feet as you jumped in. I try not to read into the influences about our childhood more than was there. Perhaps our fears had no obscurer origin than the humble domestic fact that my mother never trusted the servants with the locking-up of the house. We saw her go the rounds each night, holding a candle high to bolts, or low to locks and catches. I believe now she may have had only some natural fear, in that lonely place, of robbery. But for us children the Dread was harder to fight against, being bodyless. As everyone knows, except those most in need of knowing--I mean children--every old house is an orchestra of ghostly sound. One room at Duncombe, in particular, was an eerie place to sit in when the winds were out. You heard a kind of unearthly music played there on winter evenings. Sounds so remote from any whistling, moaning, or other wind instrumentality, that Bettina and I spoke of it in whispers: "Now the organ's playing." Our mother heard it, too. At the first note she would lift her eyes and listen. We had an obscure feeling that she heard more than we--a something behind the music. Something which we strained to catch, and often seemed upon the verge of understanding.