Since by chance I had the key in my pocket, we entered from the Park by the little door in the wall of the garden. I mention this because I was waked up about the middle of the night by the sound of this door banging to and fro against the jambs, and I believed that I must have failed to lock it after I had let my friends into the garden, the door having neither latch nor bolt, but was secured only by the lock. For awhile I lay in bed striving to shut my ears to the sound. But the wind was high, and, moreover, blew straight into the room through the open window, so that I could not but listen, and in the end grew very wakeful. The sounds were irregularly spaced according to the lulls of the wind. Now the door would flap to three or four times in quick succession, short and sharp as the crack of a pistol; now it would stand noiseless for a time while I waited and waited for it to slam. At last I could endure the worry of it no longer, and hastily donning some clothes, I clattered downstairs. The moon was shining fitfully through a scurrying rack of clouds, but as I always placed the key of the door upon the mantel-shelf of the larger parlour, and thus knew exactly where to lay my hand on it, I did not trouble to strike a light, to which omission I owed my life, and, indeed, more than my life. I stumbled past the furniture, crossed the garden, locked the door, and got me back to bed. In a few moments I fell asleep, but by a chance association of ideas--for I think that the banging of the postern must have set my thoughts that way--I began, for the first time since I came to London, to dream once more of the door in Lukstein Castle, and to see it open, and open noiselessly across the world. For the first time in the history of my nightmare fancies, that door swung back against the wall. It swung heavily, and the sound of the collision shook me to the centre. I woke trembling in every limb. It was early morning, the sun being risen, and, to my amazement, through the open window I heard the postern bang against the jamb. CHAPTER XIV. A GAME OF HIDE-AND-SEEK. Outside the boughs tossed blithely in the golden air; the wind piped among the leaves, and the birds called cheerily. But for me the morning was empty of comfort. For the recurrence of this dream filled me with an uncontrollable terror; I felt like one who gets him to bed of a night in the pride of strength, and wakes in the morning to see the stains of an old disease upon his skin. I looked back upon those first months of agony in Italy; I remembered how I had dreaded the coming of night and the quiet shadows of evening; how each day, from the moment I rose from bed, appeared to me as no more than night's forerunner. Into such desperate straits did I fall that I was seized with a wild foreboding that this period of torture was destined to return upon me again and again in some inevitable cycle of fate.