She put up her hands to take off her pearls.
As she did so, she started, hearing a noise that made her turn her head.
Just outside her door a little spiral staircase led down from her corridor to the one below, which ran at the back of the old library, and opened into the Cedar Garden at its further end.
Steps surely--light steps--along the corridor outside, and on the staircase.

Nor did they die away.

She could still hear them,--as she sat, arrested, straining her ears,--pacing slowly along the lower passage.
Her heart, after its pause, leapt into fluttering life.

This room of hers, the two passages, the library, and the staircase, represented that part of the house to which the ghost stories of Mellor clung most persistently.

Substantially the block of building was of early Tudor date, but the passages and the staircase had been alterations made with some clumsiness at the time of the erection of the eighteenth-century front, with a view to bringing these older rooms into the general plan.
Marcella, however, might demonstrate as she pleased that the Boyce who was supposed to have stabbed himself on the staircase died at least forty years before the staircase was made.