Pomona walked through the darkness, following the stairs toward the headmaster's office.
In Chapter Seventy-Five of Dream of the Red Chamber, Jia Zhen took his wives and concubines to Huifang Garden to admire the moon and drink wine. Near the first watch, he ordered people to play the flute and sing songs. Once the singing was over, they began drinking games.
Near the third watch, Jia Zhen was already eight-tenths drunk. As he was putting on more clothes and drinking tea, he suddenly heard someone sigh heavily beneath the wall.
That direction was right beside the ancestral hall, and there were no servants' quarters nearby. Yet a human voice had suddenly been heard. Everyone was terrified, and Jia Zhen shouted, "Who's there!"
Before his words had faded, a gust of wind rose. The lattice doors within the ancestral hall opened and shut, and the moonlight suddenly turned bleak, no longer as bright as before. Everyone felt their hair stand on end. Jia Zhen's drunkenness was scared away by half, but he felt that, as the head of the household, he could not appear weaker than the others. He forced himself to sit there for a while before returning to his room to rest.
Early the next morning, Jia Zhen led his sons and nephews to pay respects at the ancestral hall. Taking the opportunity to inspect its interior closely, he saw that everything was as it had always been, without any strange signs. Jia Zhen decided it had been a hallucination brought on by drink and did not mention it to anyone else. After the rites, he shut the doors and had them locked.
The ancestral hall was not mentioned again until Chapter One Hundred and Four. By then, Jia Zheng had returned after being demoted, and Lin Daiyu was