Josette picks the wrong moment to make her portrait glow. By the time Burke turns to look at it, her batteries (or whatever) have worn out and portrait is dark again.
I've never thought that the portrait ran out of ectoplasmic energy; rather I figured Josette didn't want Burke to see the ghostly glow - and now I'm wondering if it was significant that it was Burke who was in the room.
At some point, Joe's calling "Devlin!" and Burke pops into the drawing room from a direction that could only be from a door at the base of the staircase. To get to this room after entering the front door of the Old House, you'd hang a right immediately, just before reaching the staircase. We may already know that there's no door and no room there, but there really should be. That staircase isn't on the far right side of the front of the house, it's in the middle. There's a certain quantity of unexplained house there.
It's the ballroom, I tell you. And there's a pair of ghosts who are making that ballroom appear and disappear. And sometime in 1971 those ghosts will threaten the future of the whole Collins family, and the present-day Collinses will know a terror greater than they have ever known before. Just you wait and see.
We got more geographical information today. Now we have a route - incomplete albeit - from the great house to the Old House: past the greenhouse, through a clump of trees, over the broken fence, and then it's about a quarter of mile to the Old House. Meanwhile, Joe said that the Collinwood property extends for miles. I find this hard to believe, even if there was a farm that Matthew was supposed to be tending in his spare time.
I thought, as Matthew gagged Vicky, "You should never wear a scarf: someone might use it to gag you. You should always wear a scarf: you'll need it to hide the marks if a vampire bites you." Decisions, decisions. My other thought, whenever I see somebody being gagged, is: what if you gag somebody who has a cold? You could suffocate the gaggee.
