I had no sooner alighted than he wheeled his cab about and made off.
Laughing heartily at the fellow's trepidation (I have a way of laughing heartily in the dark), I made my way to the door and pulled the bell-handle.

I could hear the muffled reverberations of the bell far within the building.

Then all was silent.

I bent my ear to listen, but could hear nothing except, perhaps, the sound of a low moaning as of a person in pain or in great mental distress.

Convinced, however, from what my friend Sir Jeremy Buggam had told me, that the Grange was not empty, I raised the ponderous knocker and beat with it loudly against the door.
But perhaps at this point I may do well to explain to my readers (before they are too frightened to listen to me) how I came to be beating on the door of Buggam Grange at nightfall on a gloomy November evening.
A year before I had been sitting with Sir Jeremy Buggam, the present baronet, on the verandah of his ranch in California.
"So you don't believe in the supernatural ?" he was saying.
"Not in the slightest," I answered, lighting a cigar as I spoke.