My first feeling, I remember, was one of impotent anger--the child’s raving at the rain--that I must spend the night in that house. It was preposterous that life should ask it of me. Talk of white nights! What, pray, would be the color of mine? Then I, in my turn, “pulled myself together.” I went back to the newspapers and examined them all. The little file was arranged in chronological order and was coextensive with the Upcher case, from arrest to announcement of the execution. The _Orb_ might have been a little fuller, but not much. The West had not been fickle to Filippo. I sat staring at the neatly folded papers for a time. They seemed to me monstrous, not fit to touch, as if they were by no means innocent of Filippo Upcher’s fate. By a trick of nerves and weak lamplight, there seemed to be nothing else in the room. I was alone in the world with them. How long I sat there, fixing them with eyes that must have shown clear loathing, I have never known. There are moments like that, which contrive cunningly to exist outside of Time and Space, of which you remember only the quality. But I know that when I heard steps in the corridor, I was sure for an instant that it was Filippo Upcher returning. I was too overwrought to reflect that, whatever the perils of Rachel Upcher’s house might be, the intrusion of the dead Filippo was not one of them: that he would profit resolutely by the last league of those fortunate distances--if so it chanced, by the immunity of very Hell. It could not be Filippo’s hand that knocked so nervously on the door. Nor was it. I opened to Rachel Upcher. The first glance at her face, her eyes, her aimless, feverish, clutching hands, showed that the spell had at last been broken. She had taken off her black dress and was wrapped in loose, floating, waving pink. Have you ever imagined the Erinyes in pink? No other conceivable vision suggests the figure that stood before me. I remember wondering foolishly and irrelevantly why, if she could look like that, she had not done Ibsen better. But she brought me back to fact as she beckoned me out of the room. “I am sorry--very sorry--but--I was busy with your sister when you came in, and they have given you the wrong room. I will send some one to move your things--I will show you your room. Please come--I am sorry.” I cannot describe her voice. The words came out with difficult, unnatural haste, like blood from a wound. Between them she clutched at this or that shred of lace. But I could deal better even with frenzy than with the mask that earlier I had so little contrived to disturb. I felt relieved, disburdened. And Filippo was safe--safe. I was free to deal as I would. I stepped back into the room. The pile of papers no longer controlled my nerves. After all, they had been but the distant reek of the monster. I went over and lifted them, then faced her. “Is this what you mean by the wrong room?”