The Spy in Black by J. Storer Clouston

I went up to my room early in the evening. Eileen had been very silent, and about nine o'clock she bade us good night and left us. To sit alone with Tiel, feeling as I did and yet bound by a promise not to upbraid him, was intolerable, and so I left the parlour a few minutes after she did. As I went down the passage to the back, my way lit only by the candle I was carrying, I was struck with a sound I had heard in that house before, only never so loudly. It was the droning of the wind through the crevices of some door, and the whining melancholy note in the stillness of that house of divided plotters and confidences withheld, did nothing to raise my spirits.

When I reached my room I realised what had caused the droning. The wind had changed to a new quarter, and as another consequence my chimney was smoking badly and the room was filled with a pungent blue cloud. It is curious how events arise as consequences of trifling and utterly different circumstances. I tried opening my door and then my window, but still the fire smoked and the cloud refused to disperse. Then I had an inspiration. I have mentioned a large cupboard. It was so large as almost to be a minute room, and I remembered that it had a skylight in its sloping roof. I opened this, and as the room at once began to clear, I left it open.