I have heard voices, too. Voices seemed to be whispering in the hall as if some one were welcoming people at a funeral, voices seemed to be chatting in the basement, and again there would be a murmur like a rabble of voices all talking together in a room far away. Often it was more than a fancy, I can tell you. I heard real voices in the room of my mistress. I began to have the idea that it was not my mistress's voice alone. There seemed to be another in argument with her. There seemed to be a strange voice speaking in an undertone--a voice I thought I never had heard before. I crept up along the hall and listened. Everything was still. But in spite of all, I began to feel that there was more than one person on the other side of those thick white panels. I knew it was folly to suppose such a thing, but I began to have the idea that another--a woman or a talkative child--was with her behind the locked door. Once this impossible idea took hold of me, I did all I could to get a peep within the room. I had been bringing the meals, that were not enough to keep a kitten alive, to the crack she would open to take them in. Believe me, that the very first time I tried to poke my head around where I could see, that practice stopped, and my mistress, in a dull and heavy voice, told me to leave everything on the floor and go away. It seemed that she had grown suspicious. It seemed that she had something to conceal. I brooded over the strangeness of it all until I began to wonder how this other person, whatever or whoever it might be, had ever entered the house. I even began to wonder whether creatures could be drawn from the air and put into the form of flesh and blood. Finally came my chance to look. Three days ago, at about eleven o'clock in the morning, I heard the lock of her door slide over and a moment later she called to me. It was long after I had done her errand and had gone away that I began to be haunted by the thought that there had been no sound of the lock turning again. I heard the voices. I thought of the possibility that I might now softly open the door. "A look! A look!" I heard my own tongue saying, as I tiptoed up the stairs and as I twisted the door knob by little turns, each one no more than the width of a hair. I had been right about the lock. I discovered it at last when the door yielded. I looked in through a narrow crack. On the far side of the bare, dim room was my mistress on her knees, her clasped hands resting on the floor in front of her. She had not heard me and she seemed to be writhing as if in pain. Her skin was as pale as death. The whole picture gave a body the feeling that she had been thrown forward by some strong hand. I felt sure at that moment that I had not been mistaken--that some other person was there. I almost believed I saw its shadow falling across the floor. But after I had looked from one end to the other of the chamber, I knew at last that no one else was there.