Was it the smell?
It was not that of burning wood, hardly of burning paper, I--but here my second match went out.
Thoroughly roused now (you will say, by what ?) I felt my way out of the room and to the head of the staircase.

I remembered the candle and candlestick I had heard thrown down on the lower floor by Carmel Cumberland.

I would secure them and come back and settle these uncanny doubts.

It might be the veriest fool business, but my mind was disturbed and must be set at ease.

Nothing else seemed so important, yet I was not without anxiety for the lovely and delicate woman wandering the snow-covered roads in the teeth of a furious gale, any more than I was dead to the fact that I should never forgive myself if I allowed the man to escape whom I believed to be hiding somewhere in the rear of this house.
I had a hunt for the candlestick and a still longer one for the candle, but finally I recovered both, and, lighting the latter, felt myself, for the first time, more or less master of the situation.
Rapidly regaining the room in which my interest was now centred, I set the candlestick down on the dresser, and approached the lounge.