The House on the Marsh by Florence Warden

I gave one cry as my candle fell, and then, instinctively shutting my eyes, as if to hide from myself the dreadful fact that I was in darkness, I felt my way up the ladder out of that dreadful cellar into the store-room above. It was seven o'clock, and only just enough light came through the one little grated window high up in the wall for me to see that there was a window there. But, once on the store-room floor, I crawled cautiously round the square hole I had come up through until I came to the door, which I shut down with a strong sense of relief. Then I groped about, stumbling over hampers and boxes now and then, and scarcely able to repress a cry at each fresh obstruction, until I came at last to the door. I had left it unlocked; and the moment after I touched the handle I was on the other side. Luckily I had slipped the keys into my pocket at first sight of the black bag; and, after long but impatient fumbling, I managed in the dark to fit in the right one and to turn the lock securely. Then I groped my way along the passage; and I never in all my life felt such a thrill of heart-felt thankfulness as I did when the great baize-covered door swung to behind me, and I found myself once more in the lighted hall.

I flung myself into a chair, overwrought and exhausted by what I had suffered in the left wing, and it was not for some minutes that I noticed an envelope directed simply, in Mrs. Manners's handwriting, to "Miss Christie, The Alders," which lay on the table beside me. I tore it open, and, scarcely glancing at her kind little note saying she had received the enclosed when she called at the Beaconsburgh post-office that afternoon, pressed Laurence's letter to my lips again and again before I opened it. It said --