He hurried after noiselessly, for the floor was
thickly carpeted--and came to the foot of a winding stone stair.
Afraid beyond all things of doing nothing, and driven by the
formless conviction that if he stopped to deliberate he certainly
should do nothing, he shot up the dark screw like an ascending
bubble, passed the landing of the second floor without observing
it, and arrived in the attic regions of the ancient pile, under
low, irregular ceilings, here ascending in cones, there coming down
in abrupt triangles, or sloping away to a hidden meeting with the
floor in distant corners. His only light was the cold blue glimmer
from here and there a storm window or a skylight. As the conviction
of failure grew on him, the ghostly feeling of the place began
to invade him. All was vague, forsaken, and hopeless, as a dreary
dream, with the superadded miserable sense of lonely sleepwalking.
I suspect that the feeling we call ghostly is but the sense of
abandonment in the lack of companion life; but be this as it may,
Malcolm was glad enough to catch sight of a gleam as from a candle,
at the end of a long, low passage on which he had come after mazy
wandering. Another similar passage crossed its end, somewhere in
which must be the source of the light: he crept towards it, and
laying himself flat on the floor, peeped round the corner. His
very heart stopped to listen: seven or eight yards from him, with
a small lantern in her hand, stood a short female figure, which,
the light falling for a moment on her soft evil countenance, he
recognised as Mrs Catanach.
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