The London way seemed to be that ladies did not leave the table while men smoked. The talk was about wines, but it flagged. The Tartar kept looking at Bettina. The fitful colour in her cheeks had paled again. The scent of flowers, and that other all-pervading perfume, mixed with the tobacco, was making Bettina faint. My man noticed it. "You aren't accustomed to smoke," he said to Bettina, and he twisted his cigar round on his fruit-plate till he crushed out the burning. But the others took no notice. I was sure Bettina was trying hard to throw off her oppression. I thought of our mother; and the thought of her sent sharp aching through me. Bettina and I looked at each other. I knew by her lip she had great trouble not to cry. "Do you think," I whispered to my man, "you could ask to have a window opened?" He said we would be going into the drawing-room soon. "Drink that black coffee," he recommended. He seemed not unkind, so I tried to think why he would not do so small a thing for us as ask to have a window opened. "Are the downstairs windows barred with iron, too?" He looked sharply at me. "I believe so," he said. I thought it must be because of all the silver and valuables in the house. But he glanced at me again, as if he thought I was still wondering and might ask someone else. Then he said he had heard "it used to be a private madhouse." "_This house?_" He nodded. "You needn't say I told you." That, then, was what I had been feeling. The poor mad people who used to be shut up here--they had left this uncanny influence behind. A strangeness and a strain. The Colonel was speaking irritably to one of the footmen. Something had gone wrong with an electric-light bulb over the sideboard. "Send for Waterson to-morrow to attend to that!" No one but me seemed at all surprised to hear the Colonel giving orders in my aunt's house. As I sat there in the midst of all the contending scents, with the soft clash of silver, glass, and voices in my ears, a train of ideas raced through my brain as crazy as any that could have been harboured here in the days when.... The letters that had come out of this house Eric had called "demented." All the windows were still barred. What if it were a private madhouse still! Before my eyes the watchful big footmen turned into keepers to the Grey Hawk and to the lady upstairs. The doctor--he was for those too dangerous to trust downstairs. That was why they had laughed at my inquiry--such callousness had familiarity bred. The Colonel might be the proprietor of the house. My aunt was well off. No doubt they humoured her. With a keeper dressed like a footman, they allowed her certain liberties--to write crazy letters in her harmless intervals ... friends to dine ... nieces to divert her. They would do almost anything to keep that red look out of her eyes. "There is one thing I don't understand," I began to say to the man at my side.