On the following night there was a high wind, which shook and swayed the trees and whistled round my turret, and made the door which stood always fastened back at the top of the kitchen-stairs rattle and creak on its hinges. At last I could bear this last sound no longer. I had been sitting up late over a book, and I knew that the household must be asleep, so I slipped downstairs as softly as I could. I had got to the top of the back-staircase, and had my hand on the door, when I saw a faint glimmer of light coming along the passage below. I heard no sound. I drew back quickly, so quickly that my candle went out; and then I waited, with my heart beating fast, not so much to see who it was, as because I did not dare to move. The faint light came along swiftly, and, when close to the foot of the stairs below me, I could see that it was a shaded lantern, and could just distinguish the form of a man carrying it. Was he coming upstairs? For the next few moments I scarcely dared to breathe, and I could almost have given a cry of joy when, by some movement of the head, I recognized Mr. Rayner. He did not see me; he put the key in the lock, turned it, took the key out, went through and locked it after him so quickly and so entirely without noise that a moment afterwards I could almost have thought that I had imagined the dim scene. It had been so utterly without sound that, if my eyes had been closed, I should have known nothing about it. I made the door secure with trembling fingers, and went back to my room again, not only profoundly sorry that Mr. Reade’s surmise was correct--for I could no longer doubt that Mr. Rayner did sleep over the stables--but impressed with an eerie dread of the man who could move about in the night as noiselessly and swiftly as a spirit. When I awoke however in the fresh morning, with the wind gone down, and the sun shining in through my east window, all unpleasant impressions of the night before had faded away; and, when Mr. Rayner brought into the drawing-room after dinner a portfolio full of his sketches and panels, and was delighted with my appreciation of them--I knew something about pictures, for my father had been a painter--I felt that it was not for me to judge his actions, and that there must be some good motive that I did not know for his sleeping far out of the damp, as for everything else that he did. He proposed to paint me, and I gave him a sitting that very afternoon in the dining-room, which had a north light, though there was not much of it; and he said that he must finish it next day in his studio, and, when I objected to neglect my lessons again, he said the whole family should emigrate thither for the morning, and then perhaps I should be satisfied.