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By Root 1644 0

door. Or at least not the door Smoll used himself—and Mrs. Gallon used it too, he supposed, for she swept and grumbled everywhere about the house, so it was likely she swept and grumbled here too—and which a casual observer would maintain was the only door to the attic room. No, there had once been a door in the other corner. By day, seams in the wall showed where boards had been used to seal it, and in Pinkney’s room below, short, staggered lines in the wallboards showed where steps so steep as to be almost a ladder had once angled up. Not only was the night-lady a phantom herself, she also emerged from a phantom house. Eyeing the rectangle of the no-longer-existent doorway, Smoll wondered about the person—a grown man, stronger and more practical and authoritative than Smoll was—who had tried to shut her out, the tilting woman, her beads, her voice. And when all the sawing and hammering and painting over had failed, the man, sensibly, had gathered up his household and left. Smoll wished heartily that he could pursue them. Please, oh please! he wished he could say. Let me come with you, to whatever safe place you found!

It was not that Mr. Beecham’s house was not perfectly safe in the daytime, and full of distractions—even, on occasion, amusements, even for a boy so timid and easily mortified as Smoll. But nighttime always loomed again. Always the glad morning (the darkness easing, the clop of the passing milk-horse giving him heart) was followed—no, rushed upon, hurried out of mind, pounced on and briskly swept aside as of no account—by oncoming evening. However much Smoll lingered over the boots in the evening (See your face in ’em yet? Ridley would say, passing behind him with the last slop pail from the kitchen), there would come a point where they were done, when they were placed each pair outside the doors: Mister’s and Missus’s, Miss Edwina’s, Miss Pargeter’s, Miss Annabelle’s, Master Howard’s, Mr. Pinkney’s—and sometimes Mr. Rossiter the coachman’s as well, those wonderful long boots with all their mud that Smoll was always so grateful for. And Smoll having placed them must proceed up his flight of tiny stairs, through the hole in his floor, through the door not much larger than a coalhole cover. He must shut himself away behind that door, shake off his clothes and shrug on his chilled nightshirt and leap abed, blow out the candle and wrap himself tightly in the clean patched sheet and the blanket—as if tonight of all nights that wrapping, that tightness, might be effective against her, when every previous night, since first Smoll had been elevated from country scamp to Beecham’s boot boy, it had utterly failed to protect him.

“SMOLL, ARE YOU well?”

“Quite well, thank you, Mr. Pinkney.”

“It is only that you have . . . well, rather a burdened look about you.”

Smoll felt it and unrounded his shoulders. “Oh no, sir. I am nothing like so burdened as I was at home, carrying water and wood.”

“That is better, Smoll. It behooves a young man to maintain a good posture, whether he be in the public gaze or no, do you not think?”

“Yes, sir.”

SHE WAS NEITHER old nor young, the dream-lady; she was neither beautiful nor monstrous to look upon. She was difficult to look upon; though her presence was so sudden and so strong in the sensations it produced, her actual shape was indistinct against the surrounding darkness, except in the middle, where it resembled an hourglass. Above and below the narrow waist, she was corseted into a shape that even Smoll, whose eyes were so often cast down in the presence of ladies, or indeed of anyone taller or more important than himself, recognized as old-fashioned. Below this shape she gave to skirts that faded to nothingness, although their rustlings pressed most forcefully upon his ear. Above it, her flat-bound bosom and hunched shoulders supported a head all the more terrible for being entirely without features, except for the impression of a wealth of hair, pulled and piled and pinned into place with the same energy of compression that had been exerted on the body below. Tightness, tightness