In my Introduction to the first Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories, I tried to define what seem to me to be the basic facts about the genre. I pointed out that the ghost story must be distinguished both from the mere horror story and from the scientific extravaganza. I suggested that the ghost story draws upon the unconscious mind, in the manner of poetry; that it need offer neither logic nor moral; that it is an art form of altogether exceptional delicacy and subtlety; and that, not surprisingly, there are only about thirty or forty first-class specimens in the whole of western literature.

The ghost story is mainly a late romantic form, most of the best examples having been written at the end of the nineteenth or beginning of the twentieth centuries. On the other hand, the interest in and demand for ghost stories has never been greater than now. This is a not uncommon contemporary situation: today�s mass audiences for nineteenth century music, coming again and again to hear the same works, would have flabbergasted the impecunious and often slighted composers. Critics rail at the public indifference to music in new forms, but the only likely result is a diminution in musical interest altogether. For there is real doubt whether the romantic composers have successors of remotely comparable quality; and a strong probability that the new forms of society are responsible. A world in which everything is officially susceptible to reason, and also capable of improvement, is not a good world for writing new ghost stories either. It is only to be expected that the most distinguished living practitioner represented in the present volume, Miss Bowen, was long and exceptionally linked with a shadowy castle in Ireland. But as the reasonable part of the mind is a very small fraction (and the improvable part probably more of a fiction than anything in this book), the main consequence of undue emphasis upon reason has been a vast and uncontrolled irrationality, mainly taking the form of violence-worship. The good ghost story gives form and symbol to themes from the enormous areas of our own minds which we cannot directly discern, but which totally govern us; and also to the parallel forces of the external universe, about which we know so little, much less than people tell us.

Thus, in its way, it brings peace, as Aristotle said of tragedy. In a world mainly devoted to the production of junk (work) and the making of loud noise (leisure), it reassures us with reminders of love and death, of our own ignorance, of the continuing possibilities of drama and astonishment. Oddly enough, it is these shadows which offer permanency and make us men again. German has a word for the total effect: Ehrfurcht, or reverence for what one cannot understand. If there is one thing that modern man needs more than anything else, it is that. No wonder there is a big new readership for the supernatural. The phantoms have almost come to serve a social purpose.

We know that we do not know, and many of us do not take long to discover that confronting and admitting our ignorance is better than reliance on experts. How Love Came to Professor Guildea, one of the best ghost stories ever written, reminds us that we do not even know who or what is in the room with us. We go out into the town, where Nightmare Jack indicates what awaits us. We escape to the fields and hills and The Damned Thing may be what we meet. Not even in a place of sanctuary are we secure, perhaps there least of all: the sanctified stones have their dire claims upon us, as Man-Size in Marble proves. The important ingredient in Afterward is not the past offence but the truth, reaching far beyond ethics, that we can none of us identify what is crucial until it is too late. Many of us know ghosts that, like this one, change their identity but retain a single menace.

At first there may seem a certain justice about it all, even though crass and inflexible, like an earth-mover: somehow, when we come to think of it, we have erred, either morally or in judgment or both, so that trouble is only to be expected. The Inner Room goes far to wipe out even that tortuous comfort, so hard is it to discern where the error lay, whether indeed there had been an error. After all, few would have thought to have behaved otherwise. Our situation, or at least the situation of the sensitive among us (and who could read ghost stories that is not sensitive?), resembles that described in Our Distant Cousins; a superb allegory about cousins who are really quite close, are simply the good and beautiful everywhere. Always the reminder that we live precariously, and circumscribed by the mysterious and the omnipotent. Playing With Fire shows what happens when we attempt too much, and carry technique into areas about which we know too little for technique alone to be an adequate guide. A.�V.�Laider shows that, to the surprise of many, an occasional door to deeper knowledge is quite wide open; but that deeper knowledge does us little good. As Goethe observed, wisdom includes a recognition of what cannot be found out or usefully looked for. An exceptional man or woman can hold off fate for a spell, as in The Case of M.�Valdemar. It does not seem to do much good in the end, but possibly it is all there is. Only for a spell are we here at all. It is almost certainly better than slacking off, as in The Demon Lover, and trusting that the sheer confusion and difficulties of life, culminating supremely in a second war, will absolve us.

They are called ghost stories, and no other suggested name that has come my way, seems to me better, but connoisseurs are aware that often there is no actual ghost. In this collection, the ghosts reach a high proportion; and include at least two animal ghosts. These are quite common in the outer world as can be confirmed from the pages of Apparitions and Haunted Houses, the excellent collection of what are sometimes called �real-life ghosts,� assembled by the late Sir Ernest Bennett. In fiction, the truth is that the straight ghost of supposed tradition, full-bloodedly bloodless, with skull, shroud, chains, and perhaps groans, has been difficult to achieve since he (or often she) was, as it were, done to death by the repetitiousness of Miss Radcliffe, Monk Lewis, and their many colleagues, British and foreign. At that time, every nobleman, even if impoverished, retained at least one spectre (often more) to keep him in mind of his misdemeanours and of his destiny, rather as, to epitomise his misanthropy and despair, he kept a hermit, if he could afford one, in his park, if he had one. The common lot of young women from all classes was rape, incarceration in a convent (sometimes of diabolists), assassination, and return. These ideals changed as, with the discoveries of Marx, Darwin, and Freud, people pushed farther and farther from them fears of sin and thoughts of death, together with the fascination of both. Ghosts became shifty and occasional. They began to destroy without Shakespearean warning. Thurnley Abbey makes a spirited return to the older form. Here is the ghost head on (or off) and in the middle of the target: now a rarity, and difficult to accomplish with such success. The story shows that a definite ghost, with seeming form and outline, can be every bit as unpleasant to encounter as any more apparently modern manifestation.

It is of interest to note how directly every story in this book is told, literary artifice being used only to clarify. In the right hands, the ghosts can stand a surprising amount of clear, strong light; and be all the more disturbing for it, because less escapable. The stories are works of art, transcending and illuminating the factual evidence; but it is surprising how much raw material there is. The field is strewn with it, almost for the picking up. After he became an institution, Harry Price, the ghost hunter, whom I knew quite well, and who was neither so good nor so bad as various posthumous accounts allege, used to receive twenty odd letters a day from total strangers claiming to have seen an apparition, or enquiring whether the bumps heard on Wednesday night could be a message from a son who had died on the Somme. (He replied to all of them by return of post, from the Reform Club, and in holograph.) He said that many of the cases were surprisingly good, and, of course, followed up some of them. I myself lecture from time to time on ghosts: when questions are invited, one can always be certain of three or four stories from the body of the hall, and several more told privately at the end; and I can confirm that a large number are convincing, unexpected, and dramatic. I have often thought that the lecture is unnecessary. The speaker could well begin with the enquiry, Any Questions?, and the audience be relied upon for an interesting session.

Some people hope there are ghosts. Some people hope there are not. Most people, I suspect, manage to combine both these aspirations, hoping and dreading at the same time. They are the true initiates, to whom this book will yield the most.

I cannot pretend to say what occurred on the 14th of April last at No.�17 Badderly Gardens. Put down in black and white, my surmise might seem too crude, too grotesque, for serious consideration. And yet that something did occur, and that it was of a nature which will leave its mark upon every one of us for the rest of our lives, is as certain as the unanimous testimony of five witnesses can make it. I will not enter into any argument or speculation. I will only give a plain statement, which will be submitted to John Moir, Harvey Deacon, and Mrs.�Delamere, and withheld from publication unless they are prepared to corroborate every detail. I cannot obtain the sanction of Paul Le Duc, for he appears to have left the country.

It was John Moir (the well-known senior partner of Moir, Moir, and Sanderson) who had originally turned our attention to occult subjects. He had, like many very hard and practical men of business, a mystic side to his nature, which had led him to the examination, and eventually to the acceptance, of those elusive phenomena which are grouped together with much that is foolish, and much that is fraudulent, under the common heading of spiritualism. His researches which had begun with an open mind, ended unhappily in dogma, and he became as positive and fanatical as any other bigot. He represented in our little group the body of men who have turned these singular phenomena into a new religion.

Mrs.�Delamere, our medium, was his sister, the wife of Delamere, the rising sculptor. Our experience had shown us that to work on these subjects without a medium was as futile as for an astronomer to make observations without a telescope. On the other hand, the introduction of a paid medium was hateful to all of us. Was it not obvious that he or she would feel bound to return some result for money received, and that the temptation to fraud would be an overpowering one? No phenomena could be relied upon which were produced at a guinea an hour. But, fortunately, Moir had discovered that his sister was mediumistic�in other words, that she was a battery of that animal magnetic force which is the only form of energy which is subtle enough to be acted upon from the spiritual plane as well as from our own material one. Of course, when I say this, I do not mean to beg the question; but I am simply indicating the theories upon which we were ourselves, rightly or wrongly, explaining what we saw. The lady came, not altogether with the approval of her husband, and though she never gave indications of any very great psychic force, we were able, at least, to obtain those usual phenomena of message-tilting which are at the same time so puerile and so inexplicable. Every Sunday evening we met in Harvey Deacon�s studio at Badderly Gardens, the next house to the corner of Merton Park Road.

Harvey Deacon�s imaginative work in art would prepare anyone to find that he was an ardent lover of everything which was outr� and sensational. A certain picturesqueness in the study of the occult had been the quality which had originally attracted him to it, but his attention was speedily arrested by some of those phenomena to which I have referred, and he was coming rapidly to the conclusion that what he had looked upon as an amusing romance and an after-dinner entertainment was really a very formidable reality. He is a man with a remarkably clear and logical brain�a true descendant of his ancestor, the well-known Scottish professor�and he represented in our small circle the critical element, the man who has no prejudices, is prepared to follow facts as far as he can see them, and refuses to theorise in advance of his data. His caution annoyed Moir as much as the latter�s robust faith amused Deacon, but each in his own way was equally keen upon the matter.

And I? What am I to say that I represented? I was not the devotee. I was not the scientific critic. Perhaps the best that I can claim for myself is that I was the dilettante man about town, anxious to be in the swim of every fresh movement, thankful for any new sensation which would take me out of myself and open up fresh possibilities of existence. I am not an enthusiast myself, but I like the company of those who are. Moir�s talk, which made me feel as if we had a private pass-key through the door of death, filled me with a vague contentment. The soothing atmosphere of the s�ance with the darkened lights was delightful to me. In a word, the thing amused me, and so I was there.

It was, as I have said, upon the 14th of April last that the very singular event which I am about to put upon record took place. I was the first of the men to arrive at the studio, but Mrs.�Delamere was already there, having had afternoon tea with Mrs.�Harvey Deacon. The two ladies and Deacon himself were standing in front of an unfinished picture of his upon the easel. I am not an expert in art, and I have never professed to understand what Harvey Deacon meant by his pictures; but I could see in this instance that it was all very clever and imaginative, fairies and animals and allegorical figures of all sorts. The ladies were loud in their praises, and indeed the colour effect was a remarkable one.

�What do you think of it, Markham?� he asked.

�Well, it�s above me,� said I. �These beasts�what are they?�

�Mythical monsters, imaginary creatures, heraldic emblems�a sort of weird, bizarre procession of them.�

�With a white horse in front!�

�It�s not a horse,� said he, rather testily�which was surprising, for he was a very good-humoured fellow as a rule, and hardly ever took himself seriously.

�What is it, then?�

�Can�t you see the horn in front? It�s a unicorn. I told you they were heraldic beasts. Can�t you recognise one?�

�Very sorry, Deacon,� said I, for he really seemed to be annoyed.

He laughed at his own irritation.

�Excuse me, Markham!� said he; �the fact is that I have had an awful job over the beast. All day I have been painting him in and painting him out, and trying to imagine what a real live, ramping unicorn would look like. At last I got him, as I hoped; so when you failed to recognise it, it took me on the raw.�

�Why, of course it�s a unicorn,� said I, for he was evidently depressed at my obtuseness. �I can see the horn quite plainly, but I never saw a unicorn except beside the Royal Arms, and so I never thought of the creature. And those others are griffins and cockatrices, and dragons of sorts?�

�Yes, I had no difficulty with them. It was the unicorn which bothered me. However, there�s an end of it until to-morrow.� He turned the picture round upon the easel, and we all chatted about other subjects.

Moir was late that evening, and when he did arrive he brought with him, rather to our surprise, a small, stout Frenchman, whom he introduced as Monsieur Paul Le Duc. I say to our surprise, for we held a theory that any intrusion into our spiritual circle deranged the conditions, and introduced an element of suspicion. We knew that we could trust each other, but all our results were vitiated by the presence of an outsider. However, Moir soon reconciled us to the innovation. Monsieur Paul Le Duc was a famous student of occultism, a seer, a medium, and a mystic. He was travelling in England with a letter of introduction to Moir from the President of the Parisian brothers of the Rosy Cross. What more natural than that he should bring him to our little s�ance, or that we should feel honoured by his presence?

He was, as I have said, a small stout man, undistinguished in appearance, with a broad, smooth, clean-shaven face, remarkable only for a pair of large, brown, velvety eyes, staring vaguely out in front of him. He was well dressed, with the manners of a gentleman, and his curious little turns of English speech set the ladies smiling. Mrs.�Deacon had a prejudice against our researches and left the room, upon which we lowered the lights, as was our custom, and drew up our chairs to the square mahogany table which stood in the centre of the studio. The light was subdued, but sufficient to allow us to see each other quite plainly. I remember that I could even observe the curious, podgy little square-topped hands which the Frenchman laid upon the table.

�What a fun!� said he. �It is many years since I have sat in this fashion, and it is to me amusing. Madame is medium. Does madame make the trance?�

�Well, hardly that,� said Mrs.�Delamere. �But I am always conscious of extreme sleepiness.�

�It is the first stage. Then you encourage it, and there comes the trance. When the trance comes, then out jumps your little spirit, and so you have direct talking or writing. You leave your machine to be worked by another. Hein? But what have unicorns to do with it?�

Harvey Deacon started in his chair. The Frenchman was moving his head slowly round and staring into the shadows which draped the walls.

�What a fun!� said he. �Always unicorns. Who has been thinking so hard upon a subject so bizarre?�

�This is wonderful!� cried Deacon. �I have been trying to paint one all day. But how could you know it?�

�You have been thinking of them in this room.�

�Certainly.�

�But thoughts are things, my friend. When you imagine a thing you make a thing. You did not know it, hein? But I can see your unicorns because it is not only with my eye that I can see.�

�Do you mean to say that I create a thing which has never existed by merely thinking of it?�

�But certainly. It is the fact which lies under all other facts. That is why an evil thought is also a danger.�

�They are, I suppose, upon the astral plane?� said Moir.

�Ah, well, these are but words, my friends. They are there�somewhere�everywhere�I cannot tell myself. I see them. I could touch them.�

�You could not make us see them.�

�It is to materialise them. Hold! It is an experiment. But the power is wanting. Let us see what power we have, and then arrange what we shall do. May I place you as I wish?�

�You evidently know a great deal more about it than we do,� said Harvey Deacon; �I wish that you would take complete control.�

�It may be that the conditions are not good. But we will try what we can do. Madame will sit where she is, I next, and this gentleman beside me. Meester Moir will sit next to madame because it is well to have blacks and blondes in turn. So! And now with your permission I will turn the lights all out.�

�What is the advantage of the dark?� I asked.

�Because the force with which we deal is a vibration of ether and so also is light. We have the wires all for ourselves now�hein? You will not be frightened in the darkness, madame? What fun is such a s�ance!�

At first the darkness appeared to be absolutely pitchy, but in a few minutes our eyes became so far accustomed to it that we could just make out each other�s presence�very dimly and vaguely, it is true. I could see nothing else in the room�only the black loom of the motionless figures. We were all taking the matter much more seriously than we had ever done before.

�You will place your hands in front. It is hopeless that we touch, since we are so few round so large a table. You will compose yourself, madame, and if sleep should come to you you will not fight against it. And now we sit in silence and we expect�hein?�

So we sat in silence and expected, staring out into the blackness in front of us. A clock ticked in the passage. A dog barked intermittently far away. Once or twice a cab rattled past in the street, and the gleam of its lamps through the chink in the curtains was a cheerful break in that gloomy vigil. I felt those physical symptoms with which previous s�ances had made me familiar�the coldness of the feet, the tingling in the hands, the glow of the palms, the feeling of a cold wind upon the back. Strange little shooting pains came in my forearms, especially as it seemed to me in my left one, which was nearest to our visitor�due no doubt to disturbance of the vascular system, but worthy of some attention all the same. At the same time I was conscious of a strained feeling of expectancy which was almost painful. From the rigid, absolute silence of my companions I gathered that their nerves were as tense as my own.

And then suddenly a sound came out of the darkness�a low, sibilant sound, the quick, thin breathing of a woman. Quicker and thinner yet it came, as between clenched teeth, to end in a loud gasp with a dull rustle of cloth.

�What�s that? Is all right?� someone asked in the darkness.

�Yes, all is right,� said the Frenchman. �It is madame. She is in her trance. Now gentlemen, if you will wait quiet you will see something, I think, which will interest you much.�

Still the ticking in the hall. Still the breathing, deeper and fuller now, from the medium. Still the occasional flash, more welcome than ever, of the passing lights of the hansoms. What a gap we were bridging, the half-raised veil of the eternal on the one side and the cabs of London on the other. The table was throbbing with a mighty pulse. It swayed steadily, rhythmically, with an easy swooping, scooping motion under our fingers. Sharp little raps and cracks came from its substance, file-firing, volley-firing, the sounds of a fagot burning briskly on a frosty night.

�There is much power,� said the Frenchman. �See it on the table.�

I had thought it was some delusion of my own, but all could see it now. There was a greenish-yellow phosphorescent light�or should I say a luminous vapour rather than a light�which lay over the surface of the table. It rolled and wreathed and undulated in dim glimmering folds, turning and swirling like clouds of smoke. I could see the white, square-ended hands of the French medium in this baleful light.

�What a fun!� he cried. �It is splendid!�

�Shall we call the alphabet?� said Moir.

�But no�for we can do much better,� said our visitor. �It is but a clumsy thing to tilt the table for every letter of the alphabet, and with such a medium as madame we should do better than that.�

�Yes, you will do better,� said a voice.

�Who was that? Who spoke? Was that you, Markham?�

�No, I did not speak.�

�It was madame who spoke.�

�But it was not her voice.�

�Is that you, Mrs.�Delamere?�

�It is not the medium, but it is the power which uses the organs of the medium,� said the strange, deep voice.

�Where is Mrs.�Delamere? It will not hurt her, I trust.�

�The medium is happy in another plane of existence. She has taken my place, as I have taken hers.�

�Who are you?�

�It cannot matter to you who I am. I am one who has lived as you are living, and who has died as you will die.�

We heard the creak and grate of a cab pulling up next door. There was an argument about the fare, and the cabman grumbled hoarsely down the street. The green-yellow cloud still swirled faintly over the table, dull elsewhere, but glowing into a dim luminosity in the direction of the medium. It seemed to be piling itself up in front of her. A sense of fear and cold struck into my heart. It seemed to me that lightly and flippantly we had approached the most real and august of sacraments, that communion with the dead of which the fathers of the Church had spoken.

�Don�t you think we are going too far? Should we not break up this s�ance?� I cried.

But the others were all earnest to see the end of it. They laughed at my scruples.

�All the powers are made for use,� said Harvey Deacon. �If we can do this, we should do this. Every new departure of knowledge has been called unlawful in its inception. It is right and proper that we should inquire into the nature of death.�

�It is right and proper,� said the voice.

�There, what more could you ask?� cried Moir, who was much excited. �Let us have a test. Will you give us a test that you are really there?�

�What test do you demand?�

�Well, now�I have some coins in my pocket. Will you tell me how many?�

�We come back in the hope of teaching and of elevating, and not to guess childish riddles.�

�Ha, ha, Meester Moir, you catch it that time,� cried the Frenchman. �But surely this is very good sense what the Control is saying.�

�It is a religion, not a game,� said the cold, hard voice.

�Exactly�the very view I take of it,� cried Moir. �I am sure I am very sorry if I have asked a foolish question. You will not tell me who you are?�

�What does it matter?�

�Have you been a spirit long?�

�Yes.�

�How long?�

�We cannot reckon time as you do. Our conditions are different.�

�Are you happy?�

�Yes.�

�You would not wish to come back to life?�

�No�certainly not.�

�Are you busy?�

�We could not be happy if we were not busy.�

�What do you do.�

�I have said that the conditions are entirely different.�

�Can you give us no idea of your own work?�

�We labour for our own improvement and for the advancement of others.�

�Do you like coming here to-night?�

�I am glad to come if I can do good by coming.�

�Then to do good is your object?�

�It is the object of all life on every plane.�

�You see, Markham, that should answer your scruples.�

It did, for my doubts had passed and only interest remained.

�Have you pain in your life?� I asked.

�No; pain is a thing of the body.�

�Have you mental pain?�

�Yes; one may always be sad or anxious.�

�Do you meet the friends whom you have known on earth?�

�Some of them.�

�Why only some of them?�

�Only those who are sympathetic.�

�Do husbands meet wives?�

�Those who have truly loved.�

�And the others?�

�They are nothing to each other.�

�There must be a spiritual connection?�

�Of course.�

�Is what we are doing right?�

�If done in the right spirit.�

�What is the wrong spirit?�

�Curiosity and levity.�

�May harm come of that?�

�Very serious harm.�

�What sort of harm?�

�You may call up forces over whom you have no control.�

�Evil forces?�

�Undeveloped forces.�

�You say they are dangerous. Dangerous to body or mind?�

�Sometimes to both.�

There was a pause, and the blackness seemed to grow blacker still, while the yellow-green fog swirled and smoked upon the table.

�Any questions you would like to ask, Moir?� said Harvey Deacon.

�Only this�do you pray in your world?�

�One should pray in every world.�

�Why?�

�Because it is the acknowledgement of forces outside ourselves.�

�What religion do you hold over there?�

�We differ exactly as you do.�

�You have no certain knowledge?�

�We have only faith.�

�These questions of religion,� said the Frenchman, �they are of interest to you serious English people, but they are not so much fun. It seems to me that with this power here we might be able to have some great experience�hein? Something of which we could talk.�

�But nothing could be more interesting than this,� said Moir.

�Well if you think so, that is very well,� the Frenchman answered, peevishly. �For my part, it seems to me that I have heard all this before, and that to-night I should weesh to try some experiment with all this force which is given to us. But if you have other questions, then ask them, and when you are finish we can try something more.�

But the spell was broken. We asked and asked, but the medium sat silent in her chair. Only her deep, regular breathing showed that she was there. The mist still swirled upon the table.

�You have disturbed the harmony. She will not answer.�

�But we have learned already all that she can tell�hein? For my part I wish to see something that I have never seen before.�

�What then?�

�You will let me try?�

�What would you do?�

�I have said to you that thoughts are things. Now I wish to prove it to you, and to show you that which is only a thought. Yes, yes, I can do it and you will see. Now I ask you only to sit still and say nothing, and keep your hands quiet upon the table.�

The room was blacker and more silent than ever. The same feeling of apprehension which had lain heavily upon me at the beginning of the s�ance was back at my heart once more. The roots of my hair were tingling.

�It is working! It is working!� cried the Frenchman, and there was a crack in his voice as he spoke which told me that he also was strung to his tightest.

The luminous fog drifted slowly off the table, and wavered and flickered across the room. There in the farther and darkest corner it gathered and glowed, hardening down into a shining core�a strange, shifty, luminous, and yet non-illuminating patch of radiance, bright itself, but throwing no rays into the darkness. It had changed from a greenish-yellow to a dusky sullen red. Then round the centre there coiled a dark, smoky substance, thickening, hardening, growing denser and blacker. And then the light went out, smothered in that which had grown round it.

�It has gone.�

�Hush��there�s something in the room.�

We heard it in the corner where the light had been, something which breathed deeply and fidgeted in the darkness.

�What is it? Le Duc, what have you done?�

�It is all right. No harm will come.� The Frenchman�s voice was treble with agitation.

�Good heavens, Moir, there�s a large animal in the room. Here it is close by my chair! Go away! Go away!�

It was Harvey Deacon�s voice, and then came the sound of a blow upon some hard object. And then.�.�.�. And then�.�.�. how can I tell you what happened then?

Some huge thing hurtled against us in the darkness, rearing, stamping, smashing, springing, snorting. The table was splintered. We were scattered in every direction. It clattered and scrambled amongst us, rushing with horrible energy from one corner of the room to another. We were all screaming with fear, grovelling upon our hands and knees to get away from it. Something trod upon my left hand, and I felt the bones splinter under the weight.

�A light! A light!� someone yelled.

�Moir, you have matches, matches!�

�No, I have none. Deacon, where are the matches! For God�s sake the matches!�

�I can�t find them. Here, you Frenchman, stop it!�

�It is beyond me. Oh, mon Dieu, I cannot stop it. The door! Where is the door?�

My hand, by good luck, lit upon the handle as I groped about in the darkness. The hard-breathing, snorting, rushing creature tore past me and butted with a fearful crash against the oaken partition. The instant that it had passed I turned the handle, and next moment we were all outside, and the door shut behind us. From within came a horrible crashing and rending and stamping.

�What is it? In heaven�s name, what is it?�

�A horse. I saw it when the door opened. But Mrs.�Delamere��?�

�We must fetch her out. Come on, Markham, the longer we wait the less we shall like it.�

He flung open the door and we rushed in. She was there on the ground amidst the splinters of her chair. We seized her and dragged her swiftly out, and as we gained the door I looked over my shoulder into the darkness. There were two strange eyes glowing at us, a rattle of hoofs, and I had just time to slam the door when there came a crash upon it which split it from top to bottom.

�It�s coming through! It�s coming!�

�Run, run for your lives!� cried the Frenchman.

Another crash, and something shot through the riven door. It was a long white spike, gleaming in the lamplight. For a moment it shone before us, and then with a snap it disappeared again.

�Quick! Quick! This way!� Harvey Deacon shouted. �Carry her in! Here! Quick!�

We had taken refuge in the dining-room, and shut the heavy oak door. We laid the senseless woman upon the sofa, and as we did so, Moir, the hard man of business, drooped and fainted across the hearthrug. Harvey Deacon was as white as a corpse, jerking and twitching like an epileptic. With a crash we heard the studio door fly to pieces, and the snorting and stamping were in the passage, up and down, up and down, shaking the house with their fury. The Frenchman had sunk his face on his hands, and sobbed like a frightened child.

�What shall we do?� I shook him roughly by the shoulder. �Is a gun any use?�

�No, no. The power will pass. Then it will end.�

�You might have killed us all�you unspeakable fool�with your infernal experiments.�

�I did not know. How could I tell that it would be frightened? It is mad with terror. It was his fault. He struck it.�

Harvey Deacon sprang up. �Good heavens!� he cried.

A terrible scream sounded through the house.

�It�s my wife! Here, I�m going out. If it�s the Evil One himself I am going out!�

He had thrown open the door and rushed out into the passage. At the end of it, at the foot of the stairs, Mrs.�Deacon was lying senseless, struck down by the sight which she had seen. But there was nothing else.

With eyes of horror we looked about us, but all was perfectly quiet and still. I approached the black square of the studio door, expecting with every slow step that some atrocious shape would hurl itself out of it. But nothing came, and all was silent inside the room. Peeping and peering, our hearts in our mouths, we came to the very threshold, and stared into the darkness. There was still no sound, but in one direction there was also no darkness. A luminous, glowing cloud, with an incandescent centre, hovered in the corner of the room. Slowly it dimmed and faded, growing thinner and fainter, until at last the same dense velvety blackness filled the whole studio. And with the last flickering gleam of that baleful light the Frenchman broke into a shout of joy.

�What a fun!� he cried. �No one is hurt, and only the door broken, and the ladies frightened. But, my friends, we have done what has never been done before.�

�And as far as I can help,� said Harvey Deacon, �it will certainly never be done again.�

And that was what befell on the 14th of April last at No.�17 Badderly Gardens. I began by saying that it would seem too grotesque to dogmatise as to what it was which actually did occur; but I give my impressions, our impressions (since they are corroborated by Harvey Deacon and John Moir), for what they are worth. You may, if it pleases you, imagine that we were the victims of an elaborate and extraordinary hoax. Or you may think with us that we underwent a very real and a very terrible experience. Or perhaps you may know more than we do of such occult matters, and can inform us of some similar occurrence. In this latter case a letter to William Markham, 146M, The Albany, would help to throw a light upon that which is very dark to us.

Although every word of this story is as true as despair, I do not expect people to believe it. Nowadays a �rational explanation� is required before belief is possible. Let me, then, at once offer the �rational explanation� which finds most favour among those who have heard the tale of my life�s tragedy. It is held that we were �under a delusion,� Laura and I, on that 31st of October; and that this supposition places the whole matter on a satisfactory and believable basis. The reader can judge, when he, too, has heard my story, how far this is an �explanation,� and in what sense it is �rational.� There were three who took part in this: Laura and I and another man. The other man still lives, and can speak to the truth of the least credible part of my story.

Dull people often wondered how it came that Father Murchison and Professor Frederic Guildea were intimate friends. The one was all faith, the other all scepticism. The nature of the Father was based on love. He viewed the world with an almost childlike tenderness above his long, black cassock; and his mild, yet perfectly fearless, blue eyes seemed always to be watching the goodness that exists in humanity, and rejoicing at what they saw. The Professor, on the other hand, had a hard face like a hatchet, tipped with an aggressive black goatee beard. His eyes were quick, piercing and irreverent. The lines about his small, thin-lipped mouth were almost cruel. His voice was harsh and dry, sometimes, when he grew energetic, almost soprano. It fired off words with a sharp and clipping utterance. His habitual manner was one of distrust and investigation. It was impossible to suppose that, in his busy life, he found any time for love, either of humanity in general or of an individual.

Yet his days were spent in scientific investigations which conferred immense benefits upon the world.

Both men were celibates. Father Murchison was a member of an Anglican order which forbade him to marry. Professor Guildea had a poor opinion of most things, but especially of women. He had formerly held a post as lecturer at Birmingham. But when his fame as a discoverer grew, he removed to London. There, at a lecture he gave in the East End, he first met Father Murchison. They spoke a few words. Perhaps the bright intelligence of the priest appealed to the man of science, who was inclined, as a rule, to regard the clergy with some contempt. Perhaps the transparent sincerity of this devotee, full of common sense, attracted him. As he was leaving the hall he abruptly asked the Father to call on him at his house in Hyde Park Place. And the Father, who seldom went into the West End, except to preach, accepted the invitation.

�When will you come?� said Guildea.

He was folding up the blue paper on which his notes were written in a tiny, clear hand. The leaves rustled dryly in accompaniment to his sharp, dry voice.

�On Sunday week I am preaching in the evening at St.�Saviour�s, not far off,� said the Father.

�I don�t go to church.�

�No,� said the Father, without any accent of surprise or condemnation.

�Come to supper afterwards?�

�Thank you. I will.�

�What time will you come?�

The Father smiled.

�As soon as I have finished my sermon. The service is at six-thirty.�

�About eight then, I suppose. Don�t make the sermon too long. My number in Hyde Park Place is one hundred. Good night to you.�

He snapped an elastic band round his papers and strode off without shaking hands.

On the appointed Sunday, Father Murchison preached to a densely crowded congregation at St.�Saviour�s. The subject of his sermon was sympathy, and the comparative uselessness of man in the world unless he can learn to love his neighbour as himself. The sermon was rather long, and when the preacher, in his flowing, black cloak, and his hard, round hat, with a straight brim over which hung the ends of a black cord, made his way towards the Professor�s house, the hands of the illuminated clock disc at the Marble Arch pointed to twenty minutes past eight.

The Father hurried on, pushing his way through the crowd of standing soldiers, chattering women and giggling street boys in their Sunday best. It was a warm April night, and, when he reached number 100 Hyde Park Place, he found the Professor bare-headed on his doorstep, gazing out towards the park railings, and enjoying the soft, moist air, in front of his lighted passage.

�Ha, a long sermon!� he exclaimed. �Come in.�

�I fear it was,� said the Father, obeying the invitation. �I am that dangerous thing�an extempore preacher.�

�More attractive to speak without notes, if you can do it. Hang your hat and coat�oh, cloak�here. We�ll have supper at once. This is the dining-room.�

He opened a door on the right and they entered a long, narrow room, with a gold paper and a black ceiling, from which hung an electric lamp with a gold-coloured shade. In the room stood a small oval table with covers laid for two. The Professor rang the bell. Then he said:

�People seem to talk better at an oval table than at a square one.�

�Really. Is that so?�

�Well, I�ve had precisely the same party twice, once at a square table, once at an oval table. The first dinner was a dull failure, the second a brilliant success. Sit down, won�t you?�

�How d�you account for the difference?� said the Father, sitting down, and pulling the tail of his cassock well under him.

�H�m. I know how you�d account for it.�

�Indeed. How then?�

�At an oval table, since there are no corners, the chain of human sympathy�the electric current, is much more complete. Eh! Let me give you some soup.�

�Thank you.�

The Father took it, and, as he did so, turned his beaming blue eyes on his host. Then he smiled.

�What!� he said, in his pleasant, light tenor voice. �You do go to church sometimes, then?�

�To-night is the first time for ages. And, mind you, I was tremendously bored.�

The Father still smiled, and his blue eyes gently twinkled.

�Dear, dear!� he said, �what a pity!�

�But not by the sermon,� Guildea added. �I don�t pay a compliment. I state a fact. The sermon didn�t bore me. If it had, I should have said so, or said nothing.�

�And which would you have done?�

The Professor smiled almost genially.

�Don�t know,� he said. �What wine d�you drink?�

�None, thank you. I�m a teetotaller. In my profession and milieu it is necessary to be one. Yes, I will have some soda water. I think you would have done the first.�

�Very likely, and very wrongly. You wouldn�t have minded much.�

�I don�t think I should.�

They were intimate already. The Father felt most pleasantly at home under the black ceiling. He drank some soda water and seemed to enjoy it more than the Professor enjoyed his claret.

�You smile at the theory of the chain of human sympathy, I see,� said the Father. �Then what is your explanation of the failure of your square party with corners, the success of your oval party without them?�

�Probably on the first occasion the wit of the assembly had a chill on his liver, while on the second he was in perfect health. Yet, you see, I stick to the oval table.�

�And that means���

�Very little. By the way, your omission of any allusion to the notorious part liver plays in love was a serious one to-night.�

�Your omission of any desire for close human sympathy in your life is a more serious one.�

�How can you be sure I have no such desire?�

�I divine it. Your look, your manner, tell me it is so. You were disagreeing with my sermon all the time I was preaching. Weren�t you?�

�Part of the time.�

The servant changed the plates. He was a middle-aged, blond, thin man, with a stony white face, pale, prominent eyes, and an accomplished manner of service. When he had left the room the Professor continued.

�Your remarks interested me, but I thought them exaggerated.�

�For instance?�

�Let me play the egoist for a moment. I spend most of my time in hard work, very hard work. The results of this work, you will allow, benefit humanity.�

�Enormously,� assented the Father, thinking of more than one of Guildea�s discoveries.

�And the benefit conferred by this work, undertaken merely for its own sake, is just as great as if it were undertaken because I loved my fellow man, and sentimentally desired to see him more comfortable than he is at present. I�m as useful precisely in my present condition of�in my present non-affectional condition�as I should be if I were as full of gush as the sentimentalists who want to get murderers out of prison, or to put a premium on tyranny�like Tolstoi�by preventing the punishment of tyrants.�

�One may do great harm with affection; great good without it. Yes, that is true. Even le bon motif is not everything, I know. Still I contend that, given your powers, you would be far more useful in the world with sympathy, affection for your kind, added to them than as you are. I believe even that you would do still more splendid work.�

The Professor poured himself out another glass of claret.

�You noticed my butler?� he said.

�I did.�

�He�s a perfect servant. He makes me perfectly comfortable. Yet he has no feeling of liking for me. I treat him civilly. I pay him well. But I never think about him, or concern myself with him as a human being. I know nothing of his character except what I read of it in his last master�s letter. There are, you may say, no truly human relations between us. You would affirm that his work would be better done if I had made him personally like me as a man�of any class�can like man�of any other class?�

�I should, decidedly.�

�I contend that he couldn�t do his work better than he does it at present.�

�But if any crisis occurred?�

�What?�

�Any crisis, change in your condition. If you needed his help, not only as a man and a butler, but as a man and a brother? He�d fail you then, probably. You would never get from your servant that finest service which can only be prompted by an honest affection.�

�You have finished?�

�Quite.�

�Let us go upstairs then. Yes, those are good prints. I picked them up in Birmingham when I was living there. This is my workroom.�

They came to a double room lined entirely with books, and brilliantly, rather hardly, lit by electricity. The windows at one end looked on to the park, at the other on to the garden of a neighbouring house. The door by which they entered was concealed from the inner and smaller room by the jutting wall of the outer room, in which stood a huge writing-table loaded with letters, pamphlets and manuscripts. Between the two windows of the inner room was a cage in which a large, grey parrot was clambering, using both beak and claws to assist him in his slow and meditative peregrinations.

�You have a pet,� said the Father, surprised.

�I possess a parrot,� the Professor answered drily, �I got him for a purpose when I was making a study of the imitative powers of birds, and I have never got rid of him. A cigar?�

�Thank you.�

They sat down. Father Murchison glanced at the parrot. It had paused in its journey, and, clinging to the bars of its cage, was regarding them with attentive round eyes that looked deliberately intelligent, but by no means sympathetic. He looked away from it to Guildea, who was smoking, with his head thrown back, his sharp, pointed chin, on which the small black beard bristled, upturned. He was moving his under lip up and down rapidly. This action caused the beard to stir and look peculiarly aggressive. The Father suddenly chuckled softly.

�Why�s that?� cried Guildea, letting his chin drop down on his breast and looking at his guest sharply.

�I was thinking it would have to be a crisis indeed that could make you cling to your butler�s affections for assistance.�

Guildea smiled too.

�You�re right. It would. Here he comes.�

The man entered with coffee. He offered it gently, and retired like a shadow retreating on a wall.

�Splendid, inhuman fellow,� remarked Guildea.

�I prefer the East End lad who does my errands in Bird Street,� said the Father. �I know all his worries. He knows some of mine. We are friends. He�s more noisy than your man. He even breathes hard when he is specially solicitous, but he would do more for me than put the coals on my fire, or black my square-toed boots.�

�Men are differently made. To me the watchful eye of affection would be abominable.�

�What about that bird?�

The Father pointed to the parrot. It had got up on its perch and, with one foot uplifted in an impressive, almost benedictory, manner, was gazing steadily at the Professor.

�That�s the watchful eye of imitation, with a mind at the back of it, desirous of reproducing the peculiarities of others. No, I thought your sermon to-night very fresh, very clever. But I have no wish for affection. Reasonable liking, of course, one desires��he tugged sharply at his beard, as if to warn himself against sentimentality��but anything more would be most irksome, and would push me, I feel sure, towards cruelty. It would also hamper one�s work.�

�I don�t think so.�

�The sort of work I do. I shall continue to benefit the world without loving it, and it will continue to accept the benefits without loving me. That�s all as it should be.�

He drank his coffee. Then he added rather aggressively:

�I have neither time nor inclination for sentimentality.�

When Guildea let Father Murchison out, he followed the Father on to the doorstep and stood there for a moment. The Father glanced across the damp road into the park.

�I see you�ve got a gate just opposite you,� he said idly.

�Yes. I often slip across for a stroll to clear my brain. Good night to you. Come again some day.�

�With pleasure. Good night.�

The priest strode away, leaving Guildea standing on the step.

Father Murchison came many times again to number one hundred Hyde Park Place. He had a feeling of liking for most men and women whom he knew, and of tenderness for all, whether he knew them or not, but he grew to have a special sentiment towards Guildea. Strangely enough, it was a sentiment of pity. He pitied this hard-working, eminently successful man of big brain and bold heart, who never seemed depressed, who never wanted assistance, who never complained of the twisted skein of life or faltered in his progress along its way. The Father pitied Guildea, in fact, because Guildea wanted so little. He had told him so, for the intercourse of the two men, from the beginning, had been singularly frank.

One evening, when they were talking together, the Father happened to speak of one of the oddities of life, the fact that those who do not want things often get them, while those who seek them vehemently are disappointed in their search.

�Then I ought to have affection poured upon me,� said Guildea smiling rather grimly. �For I hate it.�

�Perhaps some day you will.�

�I hope not, most sincerely.�

Father Murchison said nothing for a moment. He was drawing together the ends of the broad band round his cassock. When he spoke he seemed to be answering someone.

�Yes,� he said slowly, �yes, that is my feeling�pity.�

�For whom?� said the Professor.

Then, suddenly, he understood. He did not say that he understood, but Father Murchison felt, and saw, that it was quite unnecessary to answer his friend�s question. So Guildea, strangely enough, found himself closely acquainted with a man�his opposite in all ways�who pitied him.

The fact that he did not mind this, and scarcely ever thought about it, shows perhaps as clearly as anything could, the peculiar indifference of his nature.

One autumn evening, a year and a half after Father Murchison and the Professor had first met, the Father called in Hyde Park Place and enquired of the blond and stony butler�his name was Pitting�whether his master was at home.

�Yes, sir,� replied Pitting. �Will you please come this way?�

He moved noiselessly up the rather narrow stairs, followed by the Father, tenderly opened the library door, and in his soft, cold voice, announced:

�Father Murchison.�

Guildea was sitting in an arm-chair, before a small fire. His thin, long-fingered hands lay outstretched upon his knees, his head was sunk down on his chest. He appeared to be pondering deeply. Pitting very slightly raised his voice.

�Father Murchison to see you, sir,� he repeated.

The Professor jumped up rather suddenly and turned sharply as the Father came in.

�Oh,� he said. �It�s you, is it? Glad to see you. Come to the fire.�

The Father glanced at him and thought him looking unusually fatigued.

�You don�t look well to-night,� the Father said.

�No?�

�You must be working too hard. That lecture you are going to give in Paris is bothering you?�

�Not a bit. It�s all arranged. I could deliver it to you at this moment verbatim. Well, sit down.�

The Father did so, and Guildea sank once more into his chair and stared hard into the fire without another word. He seemed to be thinking profoundly. His friend did not interrupt him, but quietly lit a pipe and began to smoke reflectively. The eyes of Guildea were fixed upon the fire. The Father glanced about the room, at the walls of soberly bound books, at the crowded writing-table, at the windows, before which hung heavy, dark-blue curtains of old brocade, at the cage, which stood between them. A green baize covering was thrown over it. The Father wondered why. He had never seen Napoleon�so the parrot was named�covered up at night before. While he was looking at the baize Guildea suddenly jerked up his head, and, taking his hands from his knees and clasping them, said abruptly:

�D�you think I�m an attractive man?�

Father Murchison jumped. Such a question coming from such a man astounded him.

�Bless me!� he ejaculated. �What makes you ask? Do you mean attractive to the opposite sex?�

�That�s what I don�t know,� said the Professor gloomily, and staring again into the fire. �That�s what I don�t know.�

The Father grew more astonished.

�Don�t know!� he exclaimed.

And he laid down his pipe.

�Let�s say�d�you think I�m attractive, that there�s anything about me which might draw a�a human being, or an animal irresistibly to me?�

�Whether you desired it or not?�

�Exactly�or�no, let us say definitely�if I did not desire it.�

Father Murchison pursed up his rather full, cherubic lips, and little wrinkles appeared about the corners of his blue eyes.

�There might be, of course,� he said, after a pause. �Human nature is weak, engagingly weak, Guildea. And you�re inclined to flout it I could understand a certain class of lady�the lion-hunting, the intellectual lady, seeking you. Your reputation, your great name���

�Yes, yes,� Guildea interrupted, rather irritably. �I know all that. I know.�

He twisted his long hands together, bending the palms outwards till his thin, pointed fingers cracked. His forehead was wrinkled in a frown.

�I imagine,� he said�he stopped and coughed drily, almost shrilly��I imagine it would be very disagreeable to be liked, to be run after�that is the usual expression, isn�t it�by anything one objected to.�

And now he half turned in his chair, crossed his legs one over the other, and looked at his guest with an unusual, almost piercing interrogation.

�Anything?� said the Father.

�Well�well, anyone. I imagine nothing could be more unpleasant.�

�To you�no,� answered the Father. �But�forgive me, Guildea, I cannot conceive you permitting such intrusion. You don�t encourage adoration.�

Guildea nodded his head gloomily.

�I don�t,� he said, �I don�t. That�s just it. That�s the curious part of it, that I���

He broke off deliberately, got up and stretched.

�I�ll have a pipe, too,� he said.

He went over to the mantelpiece, got his pipe, filled it and lighted it. As he held the match to the tobacco, bending forward with an enquiring expression, his eyes fell upon the green baize that covered Napoleon�s cage. He threw the match into the grate, and puffed at the pipe as he walked forward to the cage. When he reached it he put out his hand, took hold of the baize and began to pull it away. Then suddenly he pushed it back over the cage.

�No,� he said, as if to himself, �no.�

He returned rather hastily to the fire and threw himself once more into his arm-chair.

�You�re wondering,� he said to Father Murchison. �So am I. I don�t know at all what to make of it. I�ll just tell you the facts and you must tell me what you think of them. The night before last, after a day of hard work�but no harder than usual�I went to the front door to get a breath of air. You know I often do that.�

�Yes, I found you on the doorstep when I first came here.�

�Just so. I didn�t put on hat or coat. I just stood on the step as I was. My mind, I remember, was still full of my work. It was rather a dark night, not very dark. The hour was about eleven, or a quarter past. I was staring at the park, and presently I found that my eyes were directed towards somebody who was sitting, back to me, on one of the benches. I saw the person�if it was a person�through the railings.�

�If it was a person!� said the Father. �What do you mean by that?�

�Wait a minute. I say that because it was too dark for me to know. I merely saw some blackish object on the bench, rising into view above the level of the back of the seat. I couldn�t say it was man, woman or child. But something there was, and I found that I was looking at it.�

�I understand.�

�Gradually, I also found that my thoughts were becoming fixed upon this thing or person. I began to wonder, first, what it was doing there; next, what it was thinking; lastly, what it was like.�

�Some poor creature without a home, I suppose,� said the Father.

�I said that to myself. Still, I was taken with an extraordinary interest about this object, so great an interest that I got my hat and crossed the road to go into the park. As you know, there�s an entrance almost opposite to my house. Well, Murchison, I crossed the road, passed through the gate in the railings, went up to the seat, and found that there was�nothing on it.�

�Were you looking at it as you walked?�

�Part of the time. But I removed my eyes from it just as I passed through the gate, because there was a row going on a little way off, and I turned for an instant in that direction. When I saw that the seat was vacant I was seized by a most absurd sensation of disappointment, almost of anger. I stopped and looked about me to see if anything was moving away, but I could see nothing. It was a cold night and misty, and there were few people about. Feeling, as I say, foolishly and unnaturally disappointed, I retraced my steps to this house. When I got here I discovered that during my short absence I had left the hall door open�half open.�

�Rather imprudent in London.�

�Yes. I had no idea, of course, that I had done so, till I got back. However, I was only away three minutes or so.�

�Yes.�

�It was not likely that anybody had gone in.�

�I suppose not.�

�Was it?�

�Why do you ask me that, Guildea?�

�Well, well!�

�Besides, if anybody had gone in, on your return you�d have caught him, surely.�

Guildea coughed again. The Father, surprised, could not fail to recognise that he was nervous and that his nervousness was affecting him physically.

�I must have caught cold that night,� he said, as if he had read his friend�s thought and hastened to contradict it. Then he went on:

�I entered the hall, or passage, rather.�

He paused again. His uneasiness was becoming very apparent.

�And you did catch somebody?� said the Father.

Guildea cleared his throat.

�That�s just it,� he said, �now we come to it. I�m not imaginative, as you know.�

�You certainly are not.�

�No, but hardly had I stepped into the passage before I felt certain that somebody had got into the house during my absence. I felt convinced of it, and not only that, I also felt convinced that the intruder was the very person I had dimly seen sitting upon the seat in the park. What d�you say to that?�

�I begin to think you are imaginative.�

�H�m! It seemed to me that the person�the occupant of the seat�and I, had simultaneously formed the project of interviewing each other, had simultaneously set out to put that project into execution. I became so certain of this that I walked hastily upstairs into this room, expecting to find the visitor awaiting me. But there was no one. I then came down again and went into the dining-room. No one. I was actually astonished. Isn�t that odd?�

�Very,� said the Father, quite gravely.

The Professor�s chill and gloomy manner, and uncomfortable, constrained appearance kept away the humour that might well have lurked round the steps of such a discourse.

�I went upstairs again,� he continued, �sat down and thought the matter over. I resolved to forget it, and took up a book. I might perhaps have been able to read, but suddenly I thought I noticed���

He stopped abruptly. Father Murchison observed that he was staring towards the green baize that covered the parrot�s cage.

�But that�s nothing,� he said. �Enough that I couldn�t read. I resolved to explore the house. You know how small it is, how easily one can go all over it. I went all over it. I went into every room without exception. To the servants, who were having supper, I made some excuse. They were surprised at my advent, no doubt.�

�And Pitting?�

�Oh, he got up politely when I came in, stood while I was there, but never said a word. I muttered �don�t disturb yourselves,� or something of the sort, and came out. Murchison, I found nobody new in the house�yet I returned to this room entirely convinced that somebody had entered while I was in the park.�

�And gone out again before you came back?�

�No, had stayed, and was still in the house.�

�But, my dear Guildea,� began the Father, now in great astonishment. �Surely���

�I know what you want to say�what I should want to say in your place. Now, do wait. I am also convinced that this visitor has not left the house and is at this moment in it.�

He spoke with evident sincerity, with extreme gravity. Father Murchison looked him full in the face, and met his quick keen eyes.

�No,� he said, as if in reply to an uttered question: �I�m perfectly sane, I assure you. The whole matter seems almost as incredible to me as it must to you. But, as you know, I never quarrel with facts, however strange, I merely try to examine into them thoroughly. I have already consulted a doctor and been pronounced in perfect bodily health.�

He paused, as if expecting the Father to say something.

�Go on, Guildea,� he said, �you haven�t finished.�

�No. I felt that night positive that somebody had entered the house, and remained in it, and my conviction grew. I went to bed as usual, and, contrary to my expectation, slept as well as I generally do. Yet directly I woke up yesterday morning I knew that my household had been increased by one.�

�May I interrupt you for one moment? How did you know it?�

�By my mental sensation. I can only say that I was perfectly conscious of a new presence within my house, close to me.�

�How very strange,� said the Father. �And you feel absolutely certain that you are not overworked? Your brain does not feel tired? Your head is quite clear?�

�Quite. I was never better. When I came down to breakfast that morning I looked sharply into Pitting�s face. He was as coldly placid and inexpressive as usual. It was evident to me that his mind was in no way distressed. After breakfast I sat down to work, all the time ceaselessly conscious of the fact of this intruder upon my privacy. Nevertheless, I laboured for several hours, waiting for any development that might occur to clear away the mysterious obscurity of this event. I lunched. About half past two I was obliged to go out to attend a lecture. I therefore took my coat and hat, opened my door, and stepped on to the pavement. I was instantly aware that I was no longer intruded upon, and this although I was now in the street, surrounded by people. Consequently, I felt certain that the thing in my house must be thinking of me, perhaps even spying upon me.�

�Wait a moment,� interrupted the Father. �What was your sensation? Was it one of fear?�

�Oh, dear, no. I was entirely puzzled�as I am now�and keenly interested, but not in any way alarmed. I delivered my lecture with my usual ease and returned home in the evening. On entering the house again I was perfectly conscious that the intruder was still there. Last night I dined alone and spent the hours after dinner in reading a scientific work in which I was deeply interested. While I read, however, I never for one moment lost the knowledge that some mind�very attentive to me�was within hail of mine. I will say more than this�the sensation constantly increased, and, by the time I got up to go to bed, I had come to a very strange conclusion.�

�What? What was it?�

�That whoever�or whatever�had entered my house during my short absence in the park was more than interested in me.�

�More than interested in you?�

�Was fond, or was becoming fond of me.�

�Oh!� exclaimed the Father. �Now I understand why you asked me just now whether I thought there was anything about you that might draw a human being or an animal irresistibly to you.�

�Precisely. Since I came to this conclusion, Murchison, I will confess that my feeling of strong curiosity has become tinged with another feeling.�

�Of fear?�

�No, of dislike, of irritation. No�not fear, not fear.�

As Guildea repeated unnecessarily this asseveration he looked again towards the parrot�s cage.

�What is there to be afraid of in such a matter?� he added. �I�m not a child to tremble before bogies.�

In saying the last words he raised his voice sharply; then he walked quickly to the cage, and, with an abrupt movement, pulled the baize covering from it. Napoleon was disclosed, apparently dozing upon his perch with his head held slightly on one side. As the light reached him, he moved, ruffled the feathers about his neck, blinked his eyes, and began slowly to sidle to and fro, thrusting his head forward and drawing it back with an air of complacent, though rather unmeaning, energy. Guildea stood by the cage, looking at him closely, and indeed with an attention that was so intense as to be remarkable, almost unnatural.

�How absurd these birds are!� he said at length, coming back to the fire.

�You have no more to tell me?� asked the Father.

�No. I am still aware of the presence of something in my house. I am still conscious of its close attention to me. I am still irritated, seriously annoyed�I confess it�by that attention.�

�You say you are aware of the presence of something at this moment?�

�At this moment�yes.�

�Do you mean in this room, with us, now?�

�I should say so�at any rate, quite near us.�

Again he glanced quickly, almost suspiciously, towards the cage of the parrot. The bird was sitting still on its perch now. Its head was bent down and cocked sideways, and it appeared to be listening attentively to something.

�That bird will have the intonations of my voice more correctly than ever by to-morrow morning,� said the Father, watching Guildea closely with his mild blue eyes. �And it has always imitated me very cleverly.�

The Professor started slightly.

�Yes,� he said. �Yes, no doubt. Well, what do you make of this affair?�

�Nothing at all. It is absolutely inexplicable. I can speak quite frankly to you, I feel sure.�

�Of course. That�s why I have told you the whole thing.�

�I think you must be over-worked, over-strained, without knowing it.�

�And that the doctor was mistaken when he said I was all right?�

�Yes.�

Guildea knocked his pipe out against the chimney piece.

�It may be so,� he said, �I will not be so unreasonable as to deny the possibility, although I feel as well as I ever did in my life. What do you advise then?�

�A week of complete rest away from London, in good air.�

�The usual prescription. I�ll take it. I�ll go to-morrow to Westgate and leave Napoleon to keep house in my absence.�

For some reason, which he could not explain to himself, the pleasure which Father Murchison felt in hearing the first part of his friend�s final remark was lessened, was almost destroyed, by the last sentence.

He walked towards the City that night, deep in thought, remembering and carefully considering the first interview he had with Guildea in the latter�s house a year and a half before.

On the following morning Guildea left London.

Father Murchison was so busy a man that he had little time for brooding over the affairs of others. During Guildea�s week at the sea, however, the Father thought about him a great deal, with much wonder and some dismay. The dismay was soon banished, for the mild-eyed priest was quick to discern weakness in himself, quicker still to drive it forth as a most undesirable inmate of the soul. But the wonder remained. It was destined to a crescendo. Guildea had left London on a Thursday. On a Thursday he returned, having previously sent a note to Father Murchison to mention that he was leaving Westgate at a certain time. When his train ran into Victoria Station, at five o�clock in the evening, he was surprised to see the cloaked figure of his friend standing upon the grey platform behind a line of porters.

�What, Murchison!� he said. �You here! Have you seceded from your order that you are taking this holiday?�

They shook hands.

�No,� said the Father. �It happened that I had to be in this neighbourhood to-day, visiting a sick person. So I thought I would meet you.�

�And see if I were still a sick person, eh?�

The Professor glanced at him kindly, but with a dry little laugh.

�Are you?� replied the Father gently, looking at him with interest. �No, I think not. You appear very well.�

The sea air had, in fact, put some brownish red into Guildea�s always thin cheeks. His keen eyes were shining with life and energy, and he walked forward in his loose grey suit and fluttering overcoat with a vigour that was noticeable, carrying easily in his left hand his well-filled Gladstone bag.

The Father felt completely reassured.

�I never saw you look better,� he said.

�I never was better. Have you an hour to spare?�

�Two.�

�Good. I�ll send my bag up by cab, and we�ll walk across the park to my house and have a cup of tea there. What d�you say?�

�I shall enjoy it.�

They walked out of the station yard, past the flower girls and newspaper sellers towards Grosvenor Place.

�And you have had a pleasant time?� the Father said.

�Pleasant enough, and lonely. I left my companion behind me in the passage at Number 100, you know.�

�And you�ll not find him there now, I feel sure.�

�Hm!� ejaculated Guildea. �What a precious weakling you think me, Murchison.�

As he spoke he strode forward more quickly, as if moved to emphasise his sensation of bodily vigour.

�A weakling�no. But anyone who uses his brain as persistently as you do yours must require an occasional holiday.�

�And I required one very badly, eh?�

�You required one, I believe.�

�Well, I�ve had it. And now well see.�

The evening was closing in rapidly. They crossed the road at Hyde Park Corner, and entered the park, in which were a number of people going home from work; men in corduroy trousers, caked with dried mud, and carrying tin cans slung over their shoulders, and flat panniers, in which lay their tools. Some of the younger ones talked loudly or whistled shrilly as they walked.

�Until the evening,� murmured Father Murchison to himself.

�What?� asked Guildea.

�I was only quoting the last words of the text, which seems written upon life, especially upon the life of pleasure: �Man goeth forth to his work, and to his labour�.�

�Ah, those fellows are not half bad fellows to have in an audience. There were a lot of them at the lecture I gave when I first met you. I remember. One of them tried to heckle me. He had a red beard. Chaps with red beards are always hecklers. I laid him low on that occasion. Well, Murchison, and now we�re going to see.�

�What?�

�Whether my companion has departed.�

�Tell me�do you feel any expectation of�well�of again thinking something is there?�

�How carefully you choose language. No, I merely wonder.�

�You have no apprehension?�

�Not a scrap. But I confess to feeling curious.�

�Then the sea air hasn�t taught you to recognise that the whole thing came from overstrain.�

�No,� said Guildea, very drily.

He walked in silence for a minute. Then he added:

�You thought it would?�

�I certainly thought it might.�

�Make me realise that I had a sickly, morbid, rotten imagination�eh? Come now, Murchison, why not say frankly that you packed me off to Westgate to get rid of what you considered an acute form of hysteria?�

The Father was quite unmoved by this attack.

�Come now, Guildea,� he retorted, �what did you expect me to think? I saw no indication of hysteria in you. I never have. One would suppose you the last man likely to have such a malady. But which is more natural�for me to believe in your hysteria or in the truth of such a story as you told me?�

�You have me there. No, I mustn�t complain. Well, there�s no hysteria about me now, at any rate.�

�And no stranger in your house, I hope.�

Father Murchison spoke the last words with earnest gravity, dropping the half-bantering tone�which they had both assumed.

�You take the matter very seriously, I believe,� said Guildea, also speaking more gravely.

�How else can I take it? You wouldn�t have me laugh at it when you tell it me seriously?�

�No. If we find my visitor still in the house, I may even call upon you to exorcise it. But first I must do one thing.�

�And that is?�

�Prove to you, as well as myself, that it is still there.�

�That might be difficult,� said the Father, considerably surprised by Guildea�s matter-of-fact tone.

�I don�t know. If it has remained in my house I think I can find a means. And I shall not be at all surprised if it is still there�despite the Westgate air.�

In saying the last words the Professor relapsed into his former tone of dry chaff. The Father could not quite make up his mind whether Guildea was feeling unusually grave or unusually gay. As the two men drew near to Hyde Park Place their conversation died away and they walked forward silently in the gathering darkness.

�Here we are!� said Guildea at last.

He thrust his key into the door, opened it and let Father Murchison into the passage, following him closely, and banging the door.

�Here we are!� he repeated in a louder voice.

The electric light was turned on in anticipation of his arrival. He stood still and looked round.

�We�ll have some tea at once,� he said. �Ah, Pitting!�

The pale butler, who had heard the door bang, moved gently forward from the top of the stairs that led to the kitchen, greeted his master respectfully, took his coat and Father Murchison�s cloak, and hung them on two pegs against the wall.

�All�s right, Pitting? All�s as usual?� said Guildea.

�Quite so, sir.�

�Bring us up some tea to the library.�

�Yes, sir.�

Pitting retreated. Guildea waited till he had disappeared, then opened the dining-room door, put his head into the room and kept it there for a moment, standing perfectly still. Presently he drew back into the passage, shut the door, and said:

�Let�s go upstairs.�

Father Murchison looked at him enquiringly, but made no remark. They ascended the stairs and came into the library. Guildea glanced rather sharply round. A fire was burning on the hearth. The blue curtains were drawn. The bright gleam of the strong electric light fell on the long rows of books, on the writing-table�very orderly in consequence of Guildea�s holiday�and on the uncovered cage of the parrot. Guildea went up to the cage. Napoleon was sitting humped up on his perch with his feathers ruffled. His long toes, which looked as if they were covered with crocodile skin, clung to the bar. His round and blinking eyes were filmy, like old eyes. Guildea stared at the bird very hard, and then clucked his tongue against his teeth. Napoleon shook himself, lifted one foot, extended his toes, sidled along the perch to the bars nearest to the Professor and thrust his head against them. Guildea scratched it with his forefinger two or three times, still gazing attentively at the parrot; then he returned to the fire just as Pitting entered with the tea-tray.

Father Murchison was already sitting in an arm-chair on one side of the fire. Guildea took another chair and began to pour out tea, as Pitting left the room, closing the door gently behind him. The Father sipped his tea, found it hot and set the cup down on a little table at his side.

�You�re fond of that parrot, aren�t you?� he asked his friend.

�Not particularly. It�s interesting to study sometimes. The parrot mind and nature are peculiar.�

�How long have you had him?�

�About four years. I nearly got rid of him before I made your acquaintance. I�m very glad now I kept him.�

�Are you? Why is that?�

�I shall probably tell you in a day or two.�

The Father took his cup again. He did not press Guildea for an immediate explanation, but when they had both finished their tea he said:

�Well, has the sea-air had the desired effect?�

�No,� said Guildea.

The Father brushed some crumbs from the front of his cassock, and sat up higher in his chair.

�Your visitor is still here?� he asked, and his blue eyes became almost ungentle and piercing as he gazed at his friend.

�Yes,� answered Guildea, calmly.

�How do you know it, when did you know it�when you looked into the dining-room just now?�

�No. Not until I came into this room. It welcomed me here.�

�Welcomed you! In what way?�

�Simply by being here, by making me feel that it is here, as I might feel that a man was if I came into the room when it was dark.�

He spoke quietly, with perfect composure in his usual dry manner.

�Very well,� the Father said, �I shall not try to contend against your sensation, or to explain it away. Naturally, I am in amazement.�

�So am I. Never has anything in my life surprised me so much. Murchison, of course I cannot expect you to believe more than that I honestly suppose�imagine, if you like�that there is some intruder here, of what kind I am totally unaware. I cannot expect you to believe that there really is anything. If you were in my place, I in yours, I should certainly consider you the victim of some nervous delusion. I could not do otherwise. But�wait. Don�t condemn me as a hysteria patient, or as a madman, for two or three days. I feel convinced that�unless I am indeed unwell, a mental invalid, which I don�t think is possible�I shall be able very shortly to give you some proof that there is a newcomer in my house.�

�You don�t tell me what kind of proof?�

�Not yet. Things must go a little farther first. But, perhaps even to-morrow I may be able to explain myself more fully. In the meanwhile, I�ll say this, that if, eventually, I can�t bring any kind of proof that I�m not dreaming, I�ll let you take me to any doctor you like, and I�ll reasonably try to adopt your present view�that I�m suffering from an absurd delusion. That is your view, of course?�

Father Murchison was silent for a moment. Then he said, rather doubtfully:

�It ought to be.�

�But isn�t it?� asked Guildea, surprised.

�Well, you know, your manner is enormously convincing. Still, of course, I doubt. How can I do otherwise? The whole thing must be fancy.�

The Father spoke as if he were trying to recoil from a mental position he was being forced to take up.

�It must be fancy,� he repeated

�I�ll convince you by more than my manner, or I�ll not try to convince you at all,� said Guildea.

When they parted that evening, he said:

�I�ll write to you in a day or two probably. I think the proof I am going to give you has been accumulating during my absence. But I shall soon know.�

Father Murchison was extremely puzzled as he sat on the top of the omnibus going homeward.

In two days� time he received a note from Guildea asking him to call, if possible, the same evening. This he was unable to do as he had an engagement to fulfil at some East End gathering. The following day was Sunday. He wrote saying he would come on Monday, and got a wire shortly afterwards: �Yes, Monday come to dinner seven-thirty Guildea.� At half past seven he stood on the doorstep of Number 100.

Pitting let him in.

�Is the Professor quite well, Pitting?� the Father inquired as he took off his cloak.

�I believe so, sir. He has not made any complaint,� the butler formally replied. �Will you come upstairs, sir?�

Guildea met them at the door of the library. He was very pale and sombre, and shook hands carelessly with his friend.

�Give us dinner,� he said to Pitting.

As the butler retired, Guildea shut the door rather cautiously. Father Murchison had never before seen him look so disturbed.

�You�re worried, Guildea,� the Father said. �Seriously worried.�

�Yes, I am. This business is beginning to tell on me a good deal.�

�Your belief in the presence of something here continues then?�

�Oh, dear, yes. There�s no sort of doubt about the matter. The night I went across the road into the park something got into the house, though what the devil it is I can�t yet find out. But now, before we go down to dinner, I�ll just tell you something about that proof I promised you. You remember?�

�Naturally.�

�Can�t you imagine what it might be.�

Father Murchison moved his head to express a negative reply.

�Look about the room,� said Guildea. �What do you see?�

The Father glanced round the room, slowly and carefully.

�Nothing unusual. You do not mean to tell me there is any appearance of���

�Oh, no, no, there�s no conventional, white-robed, cloud-like figure. Bless my soul, no! I haven�t fallen so low as that.�

He spoke again with considerable irritation.

�Look again.�

Father Murchison looked at him, turned in the direction of his fixed eyes and saw the grey parrot clambering in its cage slowly and persistently.

�What?� he said, quickly. �Will the proof come from there?�

The Professor nodded.

�I believe so,� he said. �Now let�s go down to dinner. I want some food badly.�

They descended to the dining-room. While they ate and Pitting waited upon them, the Professor talked about birds, their habits, their curiosities, their fears and their powers of imitation. He had evidently studied this subject with the thoroughness that was characteristic of him in all that he did.

�Parrots,� he said presently, �are extraordinarily observant. It is a pity that their means of reproducing what they see are so limited. If it were not so, I have little doubt that their echo of gesture would be as remarkable as their echo of voice often is.�

�But hands are missing.�

�Yes. They do many things with their heads, however. I once knew an old woman near Goring on the Thames. She was afflicted with the palsy. She held her head perpetually sideways and it trembled, moving from right to left. Her sailor son brought her home a parrot from one of his voyages. It used to reproduce the old woman�s palsied movement of the head exactly. Those grey parrots are always on the watch.�

Guildea said the last sentence slowly and deliberately, glancing sharply over his wine at Father Murchison, and, when he had spoken it, a sudden light of comprehension dawned in the priest�s mind. He opened his lips to make a swift remark. Guildea turned his bright eyes towards Pitting, who at the moment was tenderly bearing a cheese meringue from the lift that connected the dining-room with the lower regions. The Father closed his lips again. But presently, when the butler had placed some apples on the table, had meticulously arranged the decanters, brushed away the crumbs and evaporated, he said, quickly:

�I begin to understand. You think Napoleon is aware of the intruder?�

�I know it. He has been watching my visitant ever since the night of that visitant�s arrival.�

Another flash of light came to the priest.

�That was why you covered him with green baize one evening?�

�Exactly. An act of cowardice. His behaviour was beginning to grate upon my nerves.�

Guildea pursed up his thin lips and drew his brows down, giving his face a look of sudden pain.

�But now I intend to follow his investigations,� he added, straightening his features. �The week I wasted at Westgate was not wasted by him in London, I can assure you. Have an apple.�

�No, thank you; no, thank you.�

The Father repeated the words without knowing that he did so. Guildea pushed away his glass.

�Let us come upstairs, then.�

�No, thank you,� reiterated the Father.

�Eh?�

�What am I saying?� exclaimed the Father, getting up. �I was thinking over this extraordinary affair.�

�Ah, you�re beginning to forget the hysteria theory?�

They walked out into the passage.

�Well, you are so very practical about the whole matter.�

�Why not? Here�s something very strange and abnormal come into my life. What should I do but investigate it closely and calmly?�

�What, indeed?�

The Father began to feel rather bewildered, under a sort of compulsion which seemed laid upon him to give earnest attention to a matter that ought to strike him�so he felt�as entirely absurd. When they came into the library his eyes immediately turned, with profound curiosity, towards the parrot�s cage. A slight smile curled the Professor�s lips. He recognised the effect he was producing upon his friend. The Father saw the smile.

�Oh, I�m not won over yet,� he said in answer to it.

�I know. Perhaps you may be before the evening is over. Here comes the coffee. After we have drunk it well proceed to our experiment. Leave the coffee, Pitting, and don�t disturb us again.�

�No, sir.�

�I won�t have it black to-night,� said the Father, �plenty of milk, please. I don�t want my nerves played upon.�

�Suppose we don�t take coffee at all?� said Guildea. �If we do, you may trot out the theory that we are not in a perfectly normal condition. I know you, Murchison, devout priest and devout sceptic.�

The Father laughed and pushed away his cup.

�Very well, then. No coffee.�

�One cigarette, and then to business.�

The grey blue smoke curled up.

�What are we going to do?� said the Father.

He was sitting bolt upright as if ready for action. Indeed there was no suggestion of repose in the attitudes of either of the men.

�Hide ourselves, and watch Napoleon. By the way�that reminds me.�

He got up, went to a corner of the room, picked up a piece of green baize and threw it over the cage.

�I�ll pull that off when we are hidden.�

�And tell me first if you have had any manifestation of this supposed presence during the last few days?�

�Merely an increasingly intense sensation of something here, perpetually watching me, perpetually attending to all my doings.�

�Do you feel that it follows you about?�

�Not always. It was in this room when you arrived. It is here now�I feel. But, in going down to dinner, we seemed to get away from it. The conclusion is that it remained here. Don�t let us talk about it just now.�

They spoke of other things till their cigarettes were finished. Then, as they threw away the smouldering ends, Guildea said:

�Now, Murchison, for the sake of this experiment, I suggest that we should conceal ourselves behind the curtains on either side of the cage, so that the bird�s attention may not be drawn towards us and so distracted from that which we want to know more about. I will pull away the green baize when we are hidden. Keep perfectly still, watch the bird�s proceedings, and tell me afterwards how you feel about them, how you explain them. Tread softly.�

The Father obeyed, and they stole towards the curtains that fell before the two windows. The Father concealed himself behind those on the left of the cage, the Professor behind those on the right. The latter, as soon as they were hidden, stretched out his arm, drew the baize down from the cage, and let it fall on the floor.

The parrot, which had evidently fallen asleep in the warm darkness, moved on its perch as the light shone upon it, ruffled the feathers round its throat, and lifted first one foot and then the other. It turned its head round on its supple, and apparently elastic, neck, diving its beak into the down upon its back, made some searching investigations with, as it seemed, a satisfactory result, for it soon lifted its head again, glanced around its cage, and began to address itself to a nut which had been fixed between the bars for its refreshment. With its curved beak it felt and tapped the nut, at first gently, then with severity. Finally it plucked the nut from the bars, seized it with its rough, grey toes, and, holding it down firmly on the perch, cracked it and pecked out its contents, scattering some on the floor of the cage and letting the fractured shell fall into the china bath that was fixed against the bars. This accomplished, the bird paused meditatively, extended one leg backwards, and went through an elaborate process of wing-stretching that made it look as if it were lopsided and deformed. With its head reversed, it again applied itself to a subtle and exhaustive search among the feathers of its wing. This time its investigation seemed interminable, and Father Murchison had time to realise the absurdity of the whole position, and to wonder why he had lent himself to it. Yet he did not find his sense of humour laughing at it. On the contrary, he was smitten by a sudden gust of horror. When he was talking to his friend and watching him, the Professor�s manner, generally so calm, even so prosaic, vouched for the truth of his story and the well-adjusted balance of his mind. But when he was hidden this was not so. And Father Murchison, standing behind his curtain, with his eyes upon the unconcerned Napoleon, began to whisper to himself the word�madness, with a quickening sensation of pity and of dread.

The parrot sharply contracted one wing, ruffled the feathers around its throat again, then extended its other leg backwards and proceeded to the cleaning of its other wing. In the still room the dry sound of the feather being spread was distinctly audible. Father Murchison saw the blue curtains behind which Guildea stood tremble slightly, as if a breath of wind had come through the window they shrouded. The clock in the far room chimed, and a coal dropped into the grate, making a noise like dead leaves stirring abruptly on hard ground. And again a gust of pity and of dread swept over the Father. It seemed to him that he had behaved very foolishly, if not wrongly, in encouraging what must surely be the strange dementia of his friend. He ought to have declined to lend himself to a proceeding that, ludicrous, even childish in itself, might well be dangerous in the encouragement it gave to a diseased expectation. Napoleon�s protruding leg, extended wing and twisted neck, his busy and unconscious devotion to the arrangement of his person, his evident sensation of complete loneliness, most comfortable solitude, brought home with vehemence to the Father the undignified buffoonery of his conduct; the more piteous buffoonery of his friend. He seized the curtains with his hands and was about to thrust them aside and issue forth, when an abrupt movement of the parrot stopped him. The bird, as if sharply attracted by something, paused in its pecking, and, with its head still bent backward and twisted sideways on its neck, seemed to listen intently. Its round eye looked glistening and strained, like the eye of a disturbed pigeon. Contracting its wing, it lifted its head and sat for a moment erect on its perch, shifting its feet mechanically up and down, as if dawning excitement produced in it an uncontrollable desire of movement. Then it thrust its head forward in the direction of the farther room and remained perfectly still. Its attitude so strongly suggested the concentration of its attention on something immediately before it, that Father Murchison instinctively stared about the room, half expecting to see Pitting advance softly, having entered through the hidden door. He did not come, and there was no sound in the chamber. Nevertheless, the parrot was obviously getting excited and increasingly attentive. It bent its head lower and lower, stretching out its neck until, almost falling from the perch, it half extended its wings, raising them slightly from its back, as if about to take flight, and fluttering them rapidly up and down. It continued this fluttering movement for what seemed to the Father an immense time. At length, raising its wings as far as possible, it dropped them slowly and deliberately down to its back, caught hold of the edge of its bath with its beak, hoisted itself on to the floor of the cage, waddled to the bars, thrust its head against them, and stood quite still in the exact attitude it always assumed when its head was being scratched by the Professor. So complete was the suggestion of this delight conveyed by the bird, that Father Murchison felt as if he saw a white finger gently pushed among the soft feathers of its head, and he was seized by a most strong conviction that something, unseen by him but seen and welcomed by Napoleon, stood immediately before the cage. Pulling itself up by the bars it climbed again upon its perch, sidled to the left side of the cage, and began apparently to watch something with profound interest It bowed its head oddly, paused for a moment, then bowed its head again. Father Murchison found himself conceiving�from this elaborate movement of the head�a distinct idea of a personality. The bird�s proceedings suggested extreme sentimentality combined with that sort of weak determination which is often the most persistent. Such weak determination is a very common attribute of persons who are partially idiotic. Father Murchison was moved to think of these poor creatures who will often, so strangely and unreasonably, attach themselves with persistence to those who love them least. Like many priests, he had had some experience of them, for the amorous idiot is peculiarly sensitive to the attraction of preachers. This bowing movement of the parrot recalled to his memory a terrible, pale woman who for a time haunted all churches in which he ministered, who was perpetually endeavouring to catch his eye, and who always bent her head with an obsequious and cunningly conscious smile when she did so. The parrot went on bowing, making a short pause between each genuflection, as if it waited for a signal to be given that called into play its imitative faculty.

�Yes, yes, it�s imitating an idiot,� Father Murchison caught himself saying as he watched.

And he looked again about the room, but saw nothing; except the furniture, the dancing fire, and the serried ranks of the books. Presently the parrot ceased from bowing, and assumed the concentrated and stretched attitude of one listening very keenly. He opened his beak, showing his black tongue, shut it, then opened it again. The Father thought he was going to speak, but he remained silent, although it was obvious that he was trying to bring out something. He bowed again two or three times, paused, and then, again opening his beak, made some remark. The Father could not distinguish any words, but the voice was sickly and disagreeable, a cooing, and, at the same time, querulous voice, like a woman�s, he thought. And he put his ear nearer to the curtain, listening with almost feverish attention. The bowing was resumed, but this time Napoleon added to it a sidling movement, affectionate and affected, like the movement of a silly and eager thing, nestling up to someone, or giving someone a gentle and furtive nudge. Again the Father thought of that terrible, pale woman who had haunted churches. Several times he had come upon her waiting for him after evening services. Once she had hung her head smiling, and lolled out her tongue and pushed against him sideways in the dark. He remembered how his flesh had shrunk from the poor thing, the sick loathing of her that he could not banish by remembering that her mind was all astray. The parrot paused, listened, opened his beak, and again said something in the same dove-like, amorous voice, full of sickly suggestion and yet hard, even dangerous, in its intonation. A loathsome voice, the Father thought it. But this time, although he heard the voice more distinctly than before, he could not make up his mind whether it was like a woman�s voice or a man�s�or perhaps a child�s. It seemed to be a human voice, and yet oddly sexless. In order to resolve his doubt he withdrew into the darkness of the curtains, ceased to watch Napoleon and simply listened with keen attention, striving to forget that he was listening to a bird, and to imagine that he was overhearing a human being in conversation. After two or three minutes� silence the voice spoke again, and at some length, apparently repeating several times an affectionate series of ejaculations with a cooing emphasis that was unutterably mawkish and offensive. The sickliness of the voice, its falling intonations and its strange indelicacy, combined with a die-away softness and meretricious refinement, made the Father�s flesh creep. Yet he could not distinguish any words, nor could he decide on the voice�s sex or age. One thing alone he was certain of as he stood still in the darkness�that such a sound could only proceed from something peculiarly loathsome, could only express a personality unendurably abominable to him, if not to everybody. The voice presently failed, in a sort of husky gasp, and there was a prolonged silence. It was broken by the Professor, who suddenly pulled away the curtains that hid the Father and said to him:

�Come out now, and look.�

The Father came into the light, blinking, glanced towards the cage, and saw Napoleon poised motionless on one foot with his head under his wing. He appeared to be asleep. The Professor was pale, and his mobile lips were drawn into an expression of extreme disgust.

�Faugh!� he said.

He walked to the windows of the farther room, pulled aside the curtains and pushed the glass up, letting in the air. The bare trees were visible in the grey gloom outside. Guildea leaned out for a minute drawing the night air into his lungs. Presently he turned round to the Father, and exclaimed abruptly:

�Pestilent! Isn�t it?�

�Yes�most pestilent.�

�Ever hear anything like it?�

�Not exactly.�

�Nor I. It gives me nausea, Murchison, absolute physical nausea.�

He closed the window and walked unsteadily about the room.

�What d�you make of it?� he asked, over his shoulder.

�How do you mean exactly?�

�Is it a man�s, woman�s, or child�s voice?�

�I can�t tell, I can�t make up my mind.�

�Nor I.�

�Have you heard it often?�

�Yes, since I returned from Westgate. There are never any words that I can distinguish. What a voice!�

He spat into the fire.

�Forgive me,� he said, throwing himself down in a chair. �It turns my stomach�literally.�

�And mine,� said the Father truly.

�The worst of it is,� continued Guildea, with a high nervous accent, �that there�s no brain with it, none at all�only the cunning of idiocy.�

The Father started at this exact expression of his own conviction by another.

�Why d�you start like that?� asked Guildea, with a quick suspicion which showed the unnatural condition of his nerves.

�Well, the very same idea had occurred to me.�

�What?�

�That I was listening to the voice of something idiotic.�

�Ah! That�s the devil of it, you know, to a man like me. I could fight against brain�but this!�

He sprang up again, poked the fire violently, then stood on the hearth-rug with his back to it, and his hands thrust into the high pockets of his trousers.

�That�s the voice of the thing that�s got into my house,� he said. �Pleasant, isn�t it?�

And now there was really horror in his eyes, and his voice.

�I must get it out,� he exclaimed. �I must get it out. But how?�

He tugged at his short black beard with a quivering hand.

�How?� he continued. �For what is it? Where is it?�

�You feel it�s here�now?�

�Undoubtedly. But I couldn�t tell you in what part of the room.�

He stared about, glancing rapidly at everything.

�Then you consider yourself haunted?� said Father Murchison.

He, too, was much moved and disturbed, although he was not conscious of the presence of anything near them in the room.

�I have never believed in any nonsense of that kind, as you know,� Guildea answered. �I simply state a fact, which I cannot understand, and which is beginning to be very painful to me. There is something here. But whereas most so-called hauntings have been described to me as inimical, what I am conscious of is that I am admired, loved, desired. This is distinctly horrible to me, Murchison, distinctly horrible.�

Father Murchison suddenly remembered the first evening he had spent with Guildea, and the latter�s expression almost of disgust, at the idea of receiving warm affection from anyone. In the light of that long ago conversation, the present event seemed supremely strange, and almost like a punishment for an offence committed by the Professor against humanity. But, looking up at his friend�s twitching face, the Father resolved not to be caught in the net of his hideous belief.

�There can be nothing here,� he said. �It�s impossible.�

�What does that bird imitate, then?�

�The voice of someone who has been here.�

�Within the last week then. For it never spoke like that before, and mind, I noticed that it was watching and striving to imitate something before I went away, since the night that I went into the park, only since then.�

�Somebody with a voice like that must have been here while you were away,� Father Murchison repeated, with a gentle obstinacy.

�I�ll soon find out.�

Guildea pressed the bell. Pitting stole in almost immediately.

�Pitting,� said the Professor, speaking in a high, sharp voice, �did anyone come into this room during my absence at the sea?�

�Certainly not, sir, except the maids�and me, sir.�

�Not a soul? You are certain?�

�Perfectly certain, sir.�

The cold voice of the butler sounded surprised, almost resentful. The Professor flung out his hand towards the cage.

�Has the bird been here the whole time?�

�Yes, sir.�

�He was not moved, taken elsewhere, even for a moment?�

Pitting�s pale face began to look almost expressive, and his lips were pursed.

�Certainly not, sir.�

�Thank you. That will do.�

The butler retired, moving with a sort of ostentatious rectitude. When he had reached the door, and was just going out, his master called:

�Wait a minute, Pitting.�

The butler paused. Guildea bit his lips, tugged at his beard uneasily two or three times, and then said:

�Have you noticed�er�the parrot talking lately in a�a very peculiar, very disagreeable voice?�

�Yes, sir�a soft voice like, sir.�

�Ha! Since when?�

�Since you went away, sir. He�s always at it.�

�Exactly. Well, and what did you think of it?�

�Beg pardon, sir?�

�What do you think about his talking in this voice?�

�Oh, that it�s only his play, sir.�

�I see. That�s all, Pitting.�

The butler disappeared and closed the door noiselessly behind him.

Guildea turned his eyes on his friend.

�There, you see!� he ejaculated.

�It�s certainly very odd,� said the Father. �Very odd indeed. You are certain you have no maid who talks at all like that?�

�My dear Murchison! Would you keep a servant with such a voice about you for two days?�

�No.�

�My housemaid has been with me for five years, my cook for seven. You�ve heard Pitting speak. The three of them make up my entire household. A parrot never speaks in a voice it has not heard. Where has it heard that voice?�

�But we hear nothing?�

�No. Nor do we see anything. But it does. It feels something too. Didn�t you observe it presenting its head to be scratched?�

�Certainly it seemed to be doing so.�

�It was doing so.�

Father Murchison said nothing. He was full of increasing discomfort that almost amounted to apprehension.

�Are you convinced?� said Guildea, rather irritably.

�No. The whole matter is very strange. But till I hear, see or feel�as you do�the presence of something, I cannot believe.�

�You mean that you will not?�

�Perhaps. Well, it is time I went.�

Guildea did not try to detain him, but said, as he let him out:

�Do me a favour, come again to-morrow night.�

The Father had an engagement. He hesitated, looked into the Professor�s face and said:

�I will. At nine I�ll be with you. Good night.�

When he was on the pavement he felt relieved. He turned round, saw Guildea stepping into his passage, and shivered.

Father Murchison walked all the way home to Bird Street that night. He required exercise after the strange and disagreeable evening he had spent, an evening upon which he looked back already as a man looks back upon a nightmare. In his ears, as he walked, sounded the gentle and intolerable voice. Even the memory of it caused him physical discomfort. He tried to put it from him, and to consider the whole matter calmly. The Professor had offered his proof that there was some strange presence in his house. Could any reasonable man accept such proof? Father Murchison told himself that no reasonable man could accept it. The parrot�s proceedings were, no doubt, extraordinary. The bird had succeeded in producing an extraordinary illusion of an invisible presence in the room. But that there really was such a presence the Father insisted on denying to himself. The devoutly religious, those who believe implicitly in the miracles recorded in the Bible, and who regulate their lives by the messages they suppose themselves to receive directly from the Great Ruler of a hidden world, are seldom inclined to accept any notion of supernatural intrusion into the affairs of daily life. They put it from them with anxious determination. They regard it fixedly as hocus-pocus, childish if not wicked.

Father Murchison inclined to the normal view of the devoted churchman. He was determined to incline to it. He could not�so he now told himself�accept the idea that his friend was being supernaturally punished for his lack of humanity, his deficiency in affection, by being obliged to endure the love of some horrible thing, which could not be seen, heard, or handled. Nevertheless, retribution did certainly seem to wait upon Guildea�s condition. That which he had unnaturally dreaded and shrunk from in his thought he seemed to be now forced unnaturally to suffer. The Father prayed for his friend that night before the little, humble altar in the barely-furnished, cell-like chamber where he slept.

On the following evening, when he called in Hyde Park Place, the door was opened by the housemaid, and Father Murchison mounted the stairs, wondering what had become of Pitting. He was met at the library door by Guildea and was painfully struck by the alteration in his appearance. His face was ashen in hue, and there were lines beneath his eyes. The eyes themselves looked excited and horribly forlorn. His hair and dress were disordered and his lips twitched continually, as if he were shaken by some acute nervous apprehension.

�What has become of Pitting?� asked the Father, grasping Guildea�s hot and feverish hand.

�He has left my service.�

�Left your service!� exclaimed the Father in utter amazement.

�Yes, this afternoon.�

�May one ask why?�

�I�m going to tell you. It�s all part and parcel of this�this most odious business. You remember once discussing the relations men ought to have with their servants?�

�Ah!� cried the Father, with a flash of inspiration. �The crisis has occurred?�

�Exactly,� said the Professor, with a bitter smile. �The crisis has occurred. I called upon Pitting to be a man and a brother. He responded by declining the invitation. I upbraided him. He gave me warning. I paid him his wages and told him he could go at once. And he has gone. What are you looking at me like that for?�

�I didn�t know,� said Father Murchison, hastily dropping his eyes, and looking away. �Why,� he added. �Napoleon is gone too.�

�I sold him to-day to one of those shops in Shaftesbury Avenue.�

�Why?�

�He sickened me with his abominable imitation of�his intercourse with�well, you know what he was at last night. Besides, I have no further need of his proof to tell me I am not dreaming. And, being convinced as I now am, that all I have thought to have happened has actually happened, I care very little about convincing others. Forgive me for saying so, Murchison, but I am now certain that my anxiety to make you believe in the presence of something here really arose from some faint doubt on that subject�within myself. All doubt has now vanished.�

�Tell me why.�

�I will.�

Both men were standing by the fire. They continued to stand while Guildea went on:

�Last night I felt it.�

�What?� cried the Father.

�I say that last night, as I was going upstairs to bed, I felt something accompanying me and nestling up against me.�

�How horrible!� exclaimed the Father involuntarily.

Guildea smiled dreamily.

�I will not deny the horror of it. I cannot, since I was compelled to call on Pitting for assistance.�

�But�tell me�what was it, at least what did it seem to be?�

�It seemed to be a human being. It seemed, I say; and what I mean exactly is that the effect upon me was rather that of human contact than of anything else. But I could see nothing, hear nothing. Only, three times, I felt this gentle, but determined, push against me, as if to coax me and to attract my attention. The first time it happened I was on the landing outside this room, with my foot on the first stair. I will confess to you, Murchison, that I bounded upstairs like one pursued. That is the shameful truth. Just as I was about to enter my bedroom, however, I felt the thing entering with me, and, as I have said, squeezing, with loathsome, sickening tenderness, against my side. Then���

He paused, turned towards the fire and leaned his head on his arm. The Father was greatly moved by the strange helplessness and despair of the attitude. He laid his hand affectionately on Guildea�s shoulder.

�Then?�

Guildea lifted his head. He looked painfully abashed.

�Then, Murchison, I am ashamed to say, I broke down, suddenly, unaccountably, in a way I should have thought wholly impossible to me. I struck out with my hands to thrust the thing away. It pressed more closely to me. The pressure, the contact became unbearable to me. I shouted out for Pitting. I�I believe I must have cried��Help�.�

�He came, of course?�

�Yes, with his usual soft, unemotional quiet. His calm�its opposition to my excitement of disgust and horror�must, I suppose, have irritated me. I was not myself, no, no!�

He stopped abruptly. Then:

�But I need hardly tell you that,� he added, with most piteous irony.

�And what did you say to Pitting?�

�I said that he should have been quicker. He begged my pardon. His cold voice really maddened me, and I burst out into some foolish, contemptible diatribe, called him a machine, taunted him, then�as I felt that loathsome thing nestling once more to me�begged him to assist me, to stay with me, not to leave me alone�I meant in the company of my tormentor. Whether he was frightened, or whether he was angry at my unjust and violent manner and speech a moment before, I don�t know. In any case he answered that he was engaged as a butler, and not to sit up all night with people. I suspect he thought I had taken too much to drink. No doubt that was it. I believe I swore at him as a coward�I! This morning he said he wished to leave my service. I gave him a month�s wages, a good character as a butler, and sent him off at once.�

�But the night? How did you pass it?�

�I sat up all night.�

�Where? In your bedroom?�

�Yes�with the door open�to let it go.�

�You felt that it stayed?�

�It never left me for a moment, but it did not touch me again. When it was light I took a bath, lay down for a little while, but did not close my eyes. After breakfast I had the explanation with Pitting and paid him. Then I came up here. My nerves were in a very shattered condition. Well, I sat down, tried to write, to think. But the silence was broken in the most abominable manner.�

�How?�

�By the murmur of that appalling voice, that voice of a love-sick idiot, sickly but determined. Ugh!�

He shuddered in every limb. Then he pulled himself together, assumed, with a self-conscious effort, his most determined, most aggressive, manner, and added:

�I couldn�t stand that. I had come to the end of my tether; so I sprang up, ordered a cab to be called, seized the cage and drove with it to a bird shop in Shaftesbury Avenue. There I sold the parrot for a trifle. I think, Murchison, that I must have been nearly mad then, for, as I came out of the wretched shop, and stood for an instant on the pavement among the cages of rabbits, guinea-pigs, and puppy dogs, I laughed aloud. I felt as if a load was lifted from my shoulders, as if in selling that voice I had sold the cursed thing that torments me. But when I got back to the house it was here. It�s here now. I suppose it will always be here.�

He shuffled his feet on the rug in front of the fire.

�What on earth am I to do?� he said. �I�m ashamed of myself, Murchison, but�but I suppose there are things in the world that certain men simply can�t endure. Well, I can�t endure this, and there�s an end of the matter.�

He ceased. The Father was silent. In presence of this extraordinary distress he did not know what to say. He recognised the uselessness of attempting to comfort Guildea, and he sat with his eyes turned, almost moodily, to the ground. And while he sat there he tried to give himself to the influences within the room, to feel all that was within it. He even, half-unconsciously, tried to force his imagination to play tricks with him. But he remained totally unaware of any third person with them. At length he said:

�Guildea, I cannot pretend to doubt the reality of your misery here. You must go away, and at once. When is your Paris lecture?�

�Next week. In nine days from now.�

�Go to Paris to-morrow then; you say you have never had any consciousness that this�this thing pursued you beyond your own front door!�

�Never�hitherto.�

�Go to-morrow morning. Stay away till after your lecture. And then let us see if the affair is at an end. Hope, my dear friend, hope.�

He had stood up. Now he clasped the Professor�s hand.

�See all your friends in Paris. Seek distraction. I would ask you also to seek�other help.�

He said the last words with a gentle, earnest gravity and simplicity that touched Guildea, who returned his handclasp almost warmly.

�I�ll go,� he said. �I�ll catch the ten o�clock train, and to-night I�ll sleep at an hotel, at the Grosvenor�that�s close to the station. It will be more convenient for the train.�

As Father Murchison went home that night he kept thinking of that sentence: �It will be more convenient for the train.� The weakness in Guildea that had prompted its utterance appalled him.

No letter came to Father Murchison from the Professor during the next few days, and this silence reassured him, for it seemed to betoken that all was well. The day of the lecture dawned, and passed. On the following morning, the Father eagerly opened The Times, and scanned its pages to see if there were any report of the great meeting of scientific men which Guildea had addressed. He glanced up and down the columns with anxious eyes, then suddenly his hands stiffened as they held the sheets. He had come upon the following paragraph:

The Father dropped the paper, hurried out into Bird Street, sent a wire of inquiry to Paris, and received the same day the following reply: �Returning to-morrow. Please call evening. Guildea.� On that evening the Father called in Hyde Park Place, was at once admitted, and found Guildea sitting by the fire in the library, ghastly pale, with a heavy rug over his knees. He looked like a man emaciated by a long and severe illness, and in his wide open eyes there was an expression of fixed horror. The Father started at the sight of him, and could scarcely refrain from crying out. He was beginning to express his sympathy when Guildea stopped him with a trembling gesture.

�I know all that,� Guildea said, �I know. This Paris affair��� He faltered and stopped.

�You ought never to have gone,� said the Father. �I was wrong. I ought not to have advised your going. You were not fit.�

�I was perfectly fit,� he answered, with the irritability of sickness. �But I was�I was accompanied by that abominable thing.�

He glanced hastily round him, shifted his chair and pulled the rug higher over his knees. The Father wondered why he was thus wrapped up. For the fire was bright and red and the night was not very cold.

�I was accompanied to Paris,� he continued, pressing his upper teeth upon his lower lip.

He paused again, obviously striving to control himself. But the effort was vain. There was no resistance in the man. He writhed in his chair and suddenly burst forth in a tone of hopeless lamentation.

�Murchison, this being, thing�whatever it is�no longer leaves me even for a moment. It will not stay here unless I am here, for it loves me, persistently, idiotically. It accompanied me to Paris, stayed with me there, pursued me to the lecture hall, pressed against me, caressed me while I was speaking. It has returned with me here. It is here now��he uttered a sharp cry��now, as I sit here with you. It is nestling up to me, fawning upon me, touching my hands. Man, man, can�t you feel that it is here?�

�No,� the Father answered truly.

�I try to protect myself from its loathsome contact,� Guildea continued, with fierce excitement, clutching the thick rug with both hands. �But nothing is of any avail against it. Nothing. What is it? What can it be? Why should it have come to me that night?�

�Perhaps as a punishment,� said the Father, with a quick softness.

�For what?�

�You hated affection. You put human feeling aside with contempt. You had, you desired to have, no love for anyone. Nor did you desire to receive any love from anything. Perhaps this is a punishment.�

Guildea stared into his face.

�D�you believe that?� he cried.

�I don�t know,� said the Father. �But it may be so. Try to endure it, even to welcome it. Possibly then the persecution will cease.�

�I know it means me no harm,� Guildea exclaimed, �it seeks me out of affection. It was led to me by some amazing attraction which I exercise over it ignorantly. I know that. But to a man of my nature that is the ghastly part of the matter. If it would hate me, I could bear it. If it would attack me, if it would try to do me some dreadful harm, I should become a man again. I should be braced to fight against it. But this gentleness, this abominable solicitude, this brainless worship of an idiot, persistent, sickly, horribly physical, I cannot endure. What does it want of me? What would it demand of me? It nestles to me. It leans against me. I feel its touch, like the touch of a feather, trembling about my heart, as if it sought to number my pulsations, to find out the inmost secrets of my impulses and desires. No privacy is left to me.� He sprang up excitedly. �I cannot withdraw,� he cried. �I cannot be alone, untouched, unworshipped, unwatched for even one half-second. Murchison, I am dying of this, I am dying.�

He sank down again in his chair, staring apprehensively on all sides, with the passion of some blind man, deluded in the belief that by his furious and continued effort he will attain sight. The Father knew well that he sought to pierce the veil of the invisible, and have knowledge of the thing that loved him.

�Guildea,� the Father said, with insistent earnestness, �try to endure this�do more�try to give this thing what it seeks.�

�But it seeks my love.�

�Learn to give it your love and it may go, having received what it came for.�

�T�sh! You talk like a priest. Suffer your persecutors. Do good to them that despitefully use you. You talk as a priest.�

�As a friend I spoke naturally, indeed, right out of my heart. The idea suddenly came to me that all this�truth or seeming, it doesn�t matter which�may be some strange form of lesson. I have had lessons�painful ones. I shall have many more. If you could welcome���

�I can�t! I can�t!� Guildea cried fiercely. �Hatred! I can give it that�always that, nothing but that�hatred, hatred.�

He raised his voice, glared into the emptiness of the room, and repeated, �Hatred!�

As he spoke the waxen pallor of his cheeks increased, until he looked like a corpse with living eyes. The Father feared that he was going to collapse and faint, but suddenly he raised himself upon his chair and said, in a high and keen voice full of suppressed excitement:

�Murchison, Murchison!�

�Yes. What is it?�

An amazing ecstasy shone in Guildea�s eyes.

�It wants to leave me,� he cried. �It wants to go! Don�t lose a moment! Let it out! The window�the window!�

The Father wondering, went to the near window, drew aside the curtains and pushed it open. The branches of the trees in the garden creaked drily in the light wind. Guildea leaned forward on the arms of his chair. There was silence for a moment. Then Guildea, speaking in a rapid whisper, said:

�No, no. Open this door�open the hall door. I feel�I feel that it will return the way it came. Make haste�ah, go!�

The Father obeyed�to soothe him, hurried to the door and opened it wide. Then he glanced back to Guildea. He was standing up, bent forward. His eyes were glaring with eager expectation, and, as the Father turned, he made a furious gesture towards the passage with his thin hands.

The Father hastened out and down the stairs. As he descended in me twilight he fancied he heard a slight cry from the room behind him, but he did not pause. He flung the hall door open, standing back against the wall. After waiting a moment�to satisfy Guildea, he was about to close the door again, and had his hand on it, when he was attracted irresistibly to look forth towards the park. The night was lit by a young moon, and, gazing through the railings, his eyes fell upon a bench beyond them.

Upon the bench something was sitting, huddled together very strangely.

The Father remembered instantly Guildea�s description of that former night, that night of Advent, and a sensation of horror-stricken curiosity stole through him.

Was there really something that had indeed come to the Professor? And had it finished its work, fulfilled its desire and gone back to its former existence?

The Father hesitated a moment in the doorway. Then he stepped out resolutely and crossed the road, keeping his eyes fixed upon this black or dark object that leaned so strangely upon the bench. He could not tell yet what it was like, but he fancied it was unlike anything with which his eyes were acquainted. He reached the opposite path, and was about to pass through the gate in the railings, when his arm was brusquely grasped. He started, turned round, and saw a policeman eyeing him suspiciously.

�What are you up to?� said the policeman.

The Father was suddenly aware that he had no hat upon his head, and that his appearance, as he stole forward in his cassock, with his eyes intently fixed upon the bench in the park, was probably unusual enough to excite suspicion.

�It�s all right, policeman,� he answered quickly, thrusting some money into the constable�s hand.

Then, breaking from him, the Father hurried towards the bench, bitterly vexed at the interruption. When he reached it, nothing was there. Guildea�s experience had been almost exactly repeated and, filled with unreasonable disappointment, the Father returned to the house, entered it, shut the door and hastened up the narrow stairway into the library.

On the hearth-rug, close to the fire, he found Guildea lying with his head lolled against the armchair from which he had recently risen. There was a shocking expression of terror on his convulsed face. On examining him the Father found that he was dead.

The doctor, who was called in, said that the cause of death was failure of the heart.

When Father Murchison was told this, he murmured:

�Failure of the heart! It was that then!�

He turned to the doctor and said:

�Could it have been prevented?�

The doctor drew on his gloves and answered:

�Possibly, if it had been taken in time. Weakness of the heart requires a great deal of care. The Professor was too much absorbed in his work. He should have lived very differently.�

The Father nodded.

�Yes, yes,� he said sadly.

Towards the end of her day in London Mrs.�Drover went round to her shut-up house to look for several things she wanted to take away. Some belonged to herself, some to her family, who were by now used to their country life. It was late August; it had been a steamy, showery day: at the moment the trees down the pavement glittered in an escape of humid yellow afternoon sun. Against the next batch of clouds, already piling up ink-dark, broken chimneys and parapets stood out. In her once familiar street, as in any unused channel, an unfamiliar queerness had silted up; a cat wove itself in and out of railings, but no human eye watched Mrs.�Drover�s return. Shifting some parcels under her arm, she slowly forced round her latchkey in an unwilling lock, then gave the door, which had warped, a push with her knee. Dead air came out to meet her as she went in. The staircase window having been boarded up, no light came down into the hall. But one door, she could just see, stood ajar, so she went quickly through into the room and unshuttered the big window in there. Now the prosaic woman, looking about her, was more perplexed than she knew by everything that she saw, by traces of her long former habit of life�the yellow smoke-stain up the white marble mantelpiece, the ring left by a vase on the top of the escritoire; the bruise in the wallpaper where, on the door being thrown open widely, the china handle had always hit the wall. The piano, having gone away to be stored, had left what looked like claw-marks on its part of the parquet. Though not much dust had seeped in, each object wore a film of another kind; and, the only ventilation being the chimney, the whole drawing-room smelled of the cold hearth. Mrs.�Drover put down her parcels on the escritoire and left the room to proceed upstairs; the things she wanted were in a bedroom chest.

She had been anxious to see how the house was�the part-time caretaker she shared with some neighbours was away this week on his holiday, known to be not yet back. At the best of times he did not look in often, and she was never sure that she trusted him. There were some cracks in the structure, left by the last bombing, on which she was anxious to keep an eye. Not that one could do anything��

A shaft of refracted daylight now lay across the hall. She stopped dead and stared at the hall table�on this lay a letter addressed to her.

She thought first�then the caretaker must be back. All the same, who, seeing the house shuttered, would have dropped a letter in at the box? It was not a circular, it was not a bill. And the post office redirected, to the address in the country, everything for her that came through the post. The caretaker (even if he were back) did not know she was due in London to-day�her call here had been planned to be a surprise�so his negligence in the manner of this letter, leaving it to wait in the dusk and the dust, annoyed her. Annoyed, she picked up the letter, which bore no stamp. But it cannot be important, or they would know.�.�.�. She took the letter rapidly upstairs with her, without a stop to look at the writing till she reached what had been her bedroom, where she let in light. The room looked over the garden and other gardens: the sun had gone in; as the clouds sharpened and lowered, the trees and rank lawns seemed already to smoke with dark. Her reluctance to look again at the letter came from the fact that she felt intruded upon�and by someone contemptuous of her ways. However, in the tenseness preceding the fall of rain she read it: it was a few lines.

Mrs.�Drover looked for the date: it was to-day�s. She dropped the letter on to the bed-springs, then picked it up to see the writing again�her lips, beneath the remains of lipstick, beginning to go white. She felt so much the change in her own face that she went to the mirror, polished a clear patch in it and looked at once urgently and stealthily in. She was confronted by a woman of forty-four, with eyes starting out under a hat-brim that had been rather carelessly pulled down. She had not put on any more powder since she left the shop where she ate her solitary tea. The pearls her husband had given her on their marriage hung loose round her now rather thinner throat, slipping into the V of the pink wool jumper her sister knitted last autumn as they sat round the fire. Mrs.�Drover�s most normal expression was one of controlled worry, but of assent. Since the birth of the third of her little boys, attended by a quite serious illness, she had had an intermittent muscular flicker to the left of her mouth, but in spite of this she could always sustain a manner that was at once energetic and calm.

Turning from her own face as precipitately as she had gone to meet it, she went to the chest where the things were, unlocked it, threw up the lid and knelt to search. But as rain began to come crashing down she could not keep from looking over her shoulder at the stripped bed on which the letter lay. Behind the blanket of rain the clock of the church that still stood struck six�with rapidly heightening apprehension she counted each of the slow strokes. �The hour arranged.�.�.�. My God,� she said, �what hour? How should I�.�.�.�? After twenty-five years�.�.�.�

I unpacked my things and went down to await luncheon.

It was good to be here again in this little old sleepy hostel by the sea. Hostel I say, though it spelt itself without an s and even placed a circumflex above the o. It made no other pretensions. It was very cosy indeed.

I had been here just a year before, in mid-February, after an attack of influenza. And now I had returned, after an attack of influenza. Nothing was changed. It had been raining when I left, and the waiter�there was but a single, very old waiter�had told me it was only a shower. That waiter was still here, not a day older. And the shower had not ceased.

Steadfastly it fell on to the sands, steadfastly into the iron-grey sea. I stood looking out at it from the windows of the hall, admiring it very much. There seemed to be little else to do. What little there was I did. I mastered the contents of a blue hand-bill which, pinned to the wall just beneath the framed engraving of Queen Victoria�s Coronation, gave token of a concert that was to be held�or rather, was to have been held some weeks ago�in the Town Hall, for the benefit of the Life-Boat Fund. I looked at the barometer, tapped it, was not the wiser. I glanced at a pamphlet about Our Dying Industries (a theme on which Mr.�Joseph Chamberlain was at that time trying to alarm us). I wandered to the letter-board.

These letter-boards always fascinate me. Usually some two or three of the envelopes stuck into the cross-garterings have a certain newness and freshness. They seem sure they will yet be claimed. Why not? Why shouldn�t John Doe, Esq., or Mrs.�Richard Roe, turn up at any moment? I do not know. I can only say that nothing in the world seems to me more unlikely. Thus it is that these young bright envelopes touch my heart even more than do their dusty and sallow seniors. Sour resignation is less touching than impatience for what will not be, than the eagerness that has to wane and wither. Soured beyond measure these old envelopes are. They are not nearly so nice as they should be to the young ones. They lose no chance of sneering and discouraging. Such dialogues as this are only too frequent:

A VERY YOUNG ENVELOPE: Something in me whispers that he will come to-day!

A VERY OLD ENVELOPE: He? Well that�s good! Ha, ha, ha! Why didn�t he come last week, when you came? What reason have you for supposing he�ll ever come now? It isn�t as if he were a frequenter of the place. He�s never been here. His name is utterly unknown here. You don�t suppose he�s coming on the chance of finding you?

A.V.Y.E.: It may seem silly, but�something in me whispers��

A.V.O.E.: Something in you? One has only to look at you to see there�s nothing in you but a note scribbled to him by a cousin. Look at me. There are three sheets, closely written, in me. The lady to whom I am addressed��

A.V.Y.B.: Yes, sir, yes; you told me all about her yesterday.

A.V.O.E.: And I shall do so to-day and to-morrow and every day and all day long. That young lady was a widow. She stayed here many times. She was delicate, and the air suited her. She was poor, and the tariff was just within her means. She was lonely, and had need of love. I have in me for her a passionate avowal and strictly honourable proposal, written to her, after many rough copies, by a gentleman who had made her acquaintance under this very roof. He was rich, he was charming, he was in the prime of life. He had asked if he might write to her. She had flutteringly granted his request. He posted me to her the day after his return to London. I looked forward to being torn open by her. I was very sure she would wear me and my contents next to her bosom. She was gone. She had left no address. She never returned.�.�.�. This I tell you, and shall continue to tell you, not because I want any of your callow sympathy�no, thank you!�but that you may judge how much less than slight are the chances that you yourself��

But my reader has overheard these dialogues as often as I. He wants to know what was odd about this particular letter-board before which I was standing. At first glance I saw nothing odd about it. But presently I distinguished a handwriting that was vaguely familiar. It was mine. I stared, I wondered. There is always a slight shock in seeing an envelope of one�s own after it has gone through the post. It looks as if it had gone through so much. But this was the first time I had ever seen an envelope of mine eating its heart out in bondage on a letter-board. This was outrageous. This was hardly to be believed. Sheer kindness had impelled me to write to �A.�V.�Laider, Esq.,� and this was the result! I hadn�t minded receiving no answer. Only now, indeed, did I remember that I hadn�t received one. In multitudinous London the memory of A.�V.�Laider and his trouble had soon passed from my mind. But�well, what a lesson not to go out of one�s way to write to casual acquaintances!

My envelope seemed not to recognise me as its writer. Its gaze was the more piteous for being blank. Even so had I once been gazed at by a dog that I had lost and, after many days, found in the Battersea home. �I don�t know who you are, but whoever you are, claim me, take me out of this!� That was my dog�s appeal. This was the appeal of my envelope.

I raised my hand to the letter-board, meaning to effect a swift and lawless rescue, but paused at sound of a footstep behind me. The old waiter had come to tell me that my luncheon was ready. I followed him out of the hall, not, however, without a bright glance across my shoulder to reassure the little captive that I should come back.

I had the sharp appetite of the convalescent, and this the sea-air had whetted already to a finer edge. In touch, with a dozen oysters, and with stout, I soon shed away the unreasoning anger I had felt against A.�V.�Laider. I became merely sorry for him that he had not received a letter which might perhaps have comforted him. In touch with cutlets, I felt how sorely he had needed comfort. And anon, by the big bright fireside of that small dark smoking-room where, a year ago, on the last evening of my stay here, he and I had at length spoken to each other, I reviewed in detail the tragic experience he had told me; and I fairly revelled in reminiscent sympathy with him�.�.�.

Of course I shall not pretend to consider it any matter for wonder, that the extraordinary case of M.�Valdemar has excited discussion. It would have been a miracle had it not�especially under the circumstances. Through the desire of all parties concerned, to keep the affair from the public, at least for the present, or until we had further opportunities for investigation�through our endeavours to effect this�a garbled or exaggerated account made its way into society, and became the source of many unpleasant misrepresentations, and, very naturally, of a great deal of disbelief.

It is now rendered necessary that I give the facts�as far as I comprehend them myself. They are, succinctly, these:

My attention, for the last three years, had been repeatedly drawn to the subject of Mesmerism; and, about nine months ago, it occurred to me, quite suddenly, that in the series of experiments made hitherto, there had been a very remarkable and most unaccountable omission�no person had as yet been mesmerised in articulo mortis. It remained to be seen, first, whether, in such condition, there existed in the patient any susceptibility to the magnetic influence; secondly, whether, if any existed, it was impaired or increased by the condition; thirdly, to what extent, or for how long a period, the encroachments of death might be arrested by the process. There were other points to be ascertained, but these most excited my curiosity�the last in especial, from the immensely important character of its consequences.

In looking around me for some subject by whose means I might test these particulars, I was brought to think of my friend, M.�Ernest Valdemar, the well-known compiler of the Bibliotheca Forensica, and author (under the nom de plume of Issachar Marx) of the Polish versions of Wallenstein and Gargantua. M.�Valdemar, who has resided principally at Harlem, N.Y., since the year 1839, is (or was) particularly noticeable for the extreme spareness of his person�his lower limbs much resembling those of John Randolph; and, also, for the whiteness of his whiskers, in violent contrast to the blackness of his hair. His temperament was markedly nervous, and rendered him a good subject for mesmeric experiment. On two or three occasions I had put him to sleep with little difficulty, but was disappointed in other results which his peculiar constitution had naturally led me to anticipate. His will was at no period positively, or thoroughly, under my control, and in regard to clairvoyance, I could accomplish with him nothing to be relied upon. I always attributed my failure at these points to the disordered state of his health. For some months previous to my becoming acquainted with him, his physicians had declared him in a confirmed phthisis. It was his custom, indeed, to speak calmly of his approaching dissolution, as of a matter neither to be avoided nor regretted.

When the ideas to which I have alluded first occurred to me, it was of course very natural that I should think of M.�Valdemar. I knew the steady philosophy of the man too well to apprehend any scruples from him; and he had no relatives in America who would be likely to interfere. I spoke to him frankly upon the subject; and, to my surprise, his interest seemed vividly excited. I say to my surprise; for, although he had always yielded his person freely to my experiments, he had never before given me any tokens of sympathy with what I did. His disease was of that character which would admit of exact calculation in respect to the epoch of its termination in death; and it was finally arranged between us that he would send for me about twenty-four hours before the period announced by his physicians as that of his decease.

It is now rather more than seven months since I received, from M.�Valdemar himself, the subjoined note:

I received this note within half an hour after it was written, and in fifteen minutes more I was in the dying man�s chambers. I had not seen him for ten days, and was appalled by the fearful alteration which the brief interval had wrought in him. His face wore a leaden hue; the eyes were utterly lustreless; and the emaciation was so extreme that the skin had been broken through by the cheek-bones. His expectoration was excessive. The pulse was barely perceptible. He retained, nevertheless, in a very remarkable manner, both his mental power and a certain degree of physical strength. He spoke with distinctness�took some palliative medicines without aid�and, when I entered the room, was occupied in pencilling memoranda in a pocket-book. He was propped up in the bed by pillows. Doctors D�� and F�� were in attendance.

After pressing Valdemar�s hand, I took these gentlemen aside, and obtained from them a minute account of the patient�s condition. The left lung had been for eighteen months in a semi-osseous or cartilaginous state, and was, of course, entirely useless for all purposes of vitality. The right, in its upper portion, was also partially, if not thoroughly, ossified, while the lower region was merely a mass of purulent tubercles, running one into another. Several extensive perforations existed; and, at one point, permanent adhesion to the ribs had taken place. These appearances in the right lobe were of comparatively recent date. The ossification had proceeded with very unusual rapidity; no sign of it had been discovered a month before, and the adhesion had only been observed during the three previous days. Independently of the phthisis, the patient was suspected of aneurism of the aorta; but on this point the osseous symptoms rendered an exact diagnosis impossible. It was the opinion of both physicians that M.�Valdemar would die about midnight on the morrow (Sunday). It was then seven o�clock on Saturday evening.

On quitting the invalid�s bedside to hold conversation with myself, Doctors D�� and F�� had bidden him a final farewell. It had not been their intention to return; but, at my request, they agreed to look in upon the patient about ten the next night.

When they had gone, I spoke freely with M.�Valdemar on the subject of his approaching dissolution, as well as, more particularly, of the experiment proposed. He still professed himself quite willing and even anxious to have it made, and urged me to commence it at once. A male and female nurse were in attendance; but I did not feel myself altogether at liberty to engage in a task of this character with no more reliable witnesses than these people, in case of sudden accident, might prove. I therefore postponed operations until about eight the next night, when the arrival of a medical student with whom I had some acquaintance (Mr.�Theodore L��l), relieved me from further embarrassment. It had been my design, originally, to wait for the physicians; but I was induced to proceed, first, by the urgent entreaties of M.�Valdemar, and secondly, by my conviction that I had not a moment to lose, as he was evidently sinking fast.

Mr.�L��l was so kind as to accede to my desire that he would take notes of all that occurred; and it is from his memoranda that what I now have to relate is, for the most part, either condensed or copied verbatim.

It wanted about five minutes of eight when, taking the patient�s hand, I begged him to state, as distinctly as he could, to Mr.�L��l, whether he (M.�Valdemar) was entirely willing that I should make the experiment of mesmerising him in his then condition.

He replied feebly, yet quite audibly, �Yes, I wish to be mesmerised��adding immediately afterwards, �I fear you have deferred it too long.�

While he spoke thus, I commenced the passes which I had already found most effectual in subduing him. He was evidently influenced with the first lateral stroke of my hand across his forehead; but although I exerted all my powers, no further perceptible effect was induced until some minutes after ten o�clock, when Doctors D�� and F�� called, according to appointment. I explained to them, in a few words, what I designed, and as they opposed no objection, saying that the patient was already in the death agony, I proceeded without hesitation�exchanging, however, the lateral passes for downward ones, and directing my gaze entirely into the right eye of the sufferer.

By this time his pulse was imperceptible and his breathing was stertorous, and at intervals of half a minute.

This condition was nearly unaltered for a quarter of an hour. At the expiration of this period, however, a natural although a very deep sigh escaped the bosom of the dying man, and the stertorous breathing ceased�that is to say, its stertorousness was no longer apparent; the intervals were undiminished. The patient�s extremities were of an icy coldness.

At five minutes before eleven I perceived unequivocal signs of the mesmeric influence. The glassy roll of the eye was changed for that expression of uneasy inward examination which is never seen except in cases of sleep-walking, and which it is quite impossible to mistake. With a few rapid lateral passes I made the lids quiver, as in incipient sleep, and with a few more I closed them altogether. I was not satisfied, however, with this, but continued the manipulations vigorously, and with the fullest exertion of the will, until I had completely stiffened the limbs of the slumberer, after placing them in a seemingly easy position. The legs were at full length; the arms were nearly so, and reposed on the bed at a moderate distance from the loins. The head was very slightly elevated.

When I had accomplished this, it was fully midnight, and I requested the gentlemen present to examine M.�Valdemar�s condition. After a few experiments, they admitted him to be in an unusually perfect state of mesmeric trance. The curiosity of both the physicians was greatly excited. Dr.�D�� resolved at once to remain with the patient all night, while Dr.�F�� took leave with a promise to return at daybreak. Mr.�L��l and the nurses remained.

We left M.�Valdemar entirely undisturbed until about three o�clock in the morning, when I approached him and found him in precisely the same condition as when Dr.�F�� went away�that is to say, he lay in the same position; the pulse was imperceptible; the breathing was gentle (scarcely noticeable, unless through the application of a mirror to the lips); the eyes were closed naturally; and the limbs were as rigid and as cold as marble. Still, the general appearance was certainly not that of death.

As I approached M.�Valdemar I made a kind of half effort to influence his right arm into pursuit of my own, as I passed the latter gently to and fro above his person. In such experiments with this patient I had never perfectly succeeded before, and assuredly I had little thought of succeeding now; but to my astonishment, his arm very readily, although feebly, followed every direction I assigned it with mine. I determined to hazard a few words of conversation.

�M.�Valdemar,� I said, �are you asleep?� He made no answer, but I perceived a tremor about the lips, and was thus induced to repeat the question, again and again. At its third repetition, his whole frame was agitated by a very slight shivering; the eyelids unclosed themselves so far as to display a white line of the ball; the lips moved sluggishly, and from between them, in a barely audible whisper, issued the words:

�Yes�asleep now. Do not wake me!�let me die so!�

I here felt the limbs and found them as rigid as ever. The right arm, as before, obeyed the direction of my hand. I questioned the sleep-waker again:

�Do you still feel pain in the breast, M.�Valdemar?�

The answer now was immediate, but even less audible than before:

�No pain�I am dying.�

I did not think it advisable to disturb him further just then, and nothing more was said or done until the arrival of Dr.�F��, who came a little before sunrise, and expressed unbounded astonishment at finding the patient still alive. After feeling the pulse and applying a mirror to the lips, he requested me to speak to the sleep-waker again. I did so, saying:

�M.�Valdemar, do you still sleep?�

As before, some minutes elapsed ere a reply was made; and during the interval the dying man seemed to be collecting his energies to speak. At my fourth repetition of the question, he said very faintly, almost inaudibly:

�Yes; still asleep�dying.�

It was now the opinion, or rather the wish, of the physicians, that M.�Valdemar should be suffered to remain undisturbed in his present apparently tranquil condition, until death should supervene�and this, it was generally agreed, must now take place within a few minutes. I concluded, however, to speak to him once more, and merely repeated my previous question.

While I spoke, there came a marked change over the countenance of the sleep-waker. The eyes rolled themselves slowly open, the pupils disappearing upwardly; the skin generally assumed a cadaverous hue, resembling not so much parchment as white paper; and the circular hectic spots which, hitherto, had been strongly defined in the centre of each cheek, went out at once. I use this expression, because the suddenness of their departure put me in mind of nothing so much as the extinguishment of a candle by a puff of the breath. The upper lip, at the same time, writhed itself away from the teeth, which it had previously covered completely; while the lower jaw fell with an audible jerk, leaving the mouth widely extended, and disclosing in full view the swollen and blackened tongue. I presume that no member of the party then present had been unaccustomed to death-bed horrors; but so hideous beyond conception was the appearance of M.�Valdemar at this moment, that there was a general shrinking back from the region of the bed.

I now feel that I have reached a point of this narrative at which every reader will be startled into positive disbelief. It is my business, however, simply to proceed.

There was no longer the faintest sign of vitality in M.�Valdemar; and concluding him to be dead, we were consigning him to the charge of the nurses, when a strong vibratory motion was observable in the tongue. This continued for perhaps a minute. At the expiration of this period, there issued from the distended and motionless jaws a voice�such as it would be madness in me to attempt describing. There are, indeed, two or three epithets which might be considered as applicable to it in parts; I might say for example, that the sound was harsh, and broken, and hollow; but the hideous whole is indescribable, for the simple reason that no similar sounds have ever jarred upon the ear of humanity. There were two particulars, nevertheless, which I thought then, and still think, might fairly be stated as characteristic of the intonation�as well adapted to convey some idea of its unearthly peculiarity. In the first place, the voice seemed to reach our ears�at least mine�from a vast distance, or from some deep cavern within the earth. In the second place, it impressed me (I fear, indeed, that it will be impossible to make myself comprehended) as gelatinous or glutinous matters impress the sense of touch.

I have spoken both of �sound� and of �voice.� I mean to say that the sound was one of distinct�of even wonderfully, thrillingly distinct�syllabification. M.�Valdemar spoke�obviously in reply to the question I had propounded to him a few minutes before. I had asked him, it will be remembered, if he still slept. He now said:

�Yes�no�I have been sleeping�and no�now�I am dead.�

No person present even affected to deny, or attempted to repress, the unutterable, shuddering horror which these few words, thus uttered, were so well calculated to convey.

Mr.�L��l (the student) swooned. The nurses immediately left the chamber, and could not be induced to return. For nearly an hour, we busied ourselves, silently�without the utterance of a word�in endeavours to revive Mr.�L��l. When he came to himself, we addressed ourselves again to an investigation of M.�Valdemar�s condition.

It remained in all respects as I have last described it, with the exception that the mirror no longer afforded evidence of respiration. An attempt to draw blood from the arm failed. I should mention, too, that this limb was no further subject to my will. I endeavoured in vain to make it follow the direction of my hand. The only real indication, indeed, of the mesmeric influence, was now found in the vibratory movement of the tongue, whenever I addressed M.�Valdemar a question. He seemed to be making an effort to reply, but had no longer sufficient volition. To queries put to him by any other person than myself he seemed utterly insensible�although I endeavoured to place each member of the company in mesmeric rapport with him. I believe that I have now related all that is necessary to an understanding of the sleep-waker�s state at this epoch. Other nurses were procured; and at ten o�clock I left the house in company with the two physicians and Mr.�L��l.

In the afternoon we all called again to see the patient. His condition remained precisely the same. We had now some discussion as to the propriety and feasibility of awakening him; but we had little difficulty in agreeing that no good purpose would be served by so doing. It was evident that, so far, death (or what is usually termed death) had been arrested by the mesmeric process. It seemed clear to us all that to awaken M.�Valdemar would be merely to insure his instant, or at least his speedy dissolution.

From this period until the close of last week�an interval of nearly seven months�we continued to make daily calls at M.�Valdemar�s house, accompanied, now and then, by medical and other friends. All this time the sleep-waker remained exactly as I have last described him. The nurses� attentions were continual.

It was on Friday last that we finally resolved to make the experiment of awakening, or attempting to awaken him; and it is the (perhaps) unfortunate result of this latter experiment which has given rise to so much discussion in private circles�to so much of what I cannot help thinking unwarranted popular feeling.

For the purpose of relieving M.�Valdemar from the mesmeric trance, I made use of the customary passes. These, for a time, were unsuccessful. The first indication of revival was afforded by a partial descent of the iris. It was observed, as especially remarkable, that this lowering of the pupil was accompanied by the profuse out-flowing of a yellowish ichor (from beneath the lids) a ungent and highly offensive odour.

It was now suggested that I should attempt to influence the patient�s arm, as heretofore. I made the attempt and failed. Dr.�F�� then intimated a desire to have me put a question. I did so, as follows:

�M.�Valdemar, can you explain to us what are your feelings or wishes now?�

There was an instant return of the hectic circles on the cheeks; the tongue quivered, or rather rolled violently in the mouth (although the jaws and lips remained rigid as before); and at length the same hideous voice which I have already described, broke forth:

�For God�s sake!�quick!�quick!�put me to sleep�or, quick!�waken me!�quick!�I say to you that I am dead!�

I was thoroughly unnerved, and for an instant remained undecided what to do. At first I made an endeavour to re-compose the patient; but, failing in this through total abeyance of the will, I retraced my steps and as earnestly struggled to awaken him. In this attempt I soon saw that I should be successful�or at least I soon fancied that my success would be complete�and I am sure that all in the room were prepared to see the patient awaken.

For what really occurred, however, it is quite impossible that any human being could have been prepared.

As I rapidly made the mesmeric passes, amid ejaculations of �dead! dead!� absolutely bursting from the tongue and not from the lips of the sufferer, his whole frame at once�within the space of a single minute, or even less, shrunk�crumbled�absolutely rotted away beneath my hands. Upon the bed, before that whole company, there lay a nearly liquid mass of loathsome�of detestable putridity.

I was elected a member of the club to which Jorkens belongs. The Billiards Club it is called, though they don�t play much billiards there. I went there many days before I met Jorkens again; and heard many tales after lunch, when we sat round the fire; but somehow there seemed something missing in all of them, to one who was waiting for one of Jorkens�s. One heard tales of many lands and of many peoples, some of them strange enough; and yet, just when the story promised to grip one, there was something that was not there. Or perhaps there was too much; too many facts, too impartial a love of truth, that led so many of them to throw everything into their tales, apart from its interest, merely because it was true. I do not mean that Jorkens�s tales were not true, as to some extent his biographer I should be the last to suggest that; it would be unfair to a man from whom I have had so much entertainment. I give the words as they fell from his lips, so far as I can remember them, and leave the reader to judge.

Well, about the fifth time I came in, to my great delight there was Jorkens. He was not very talkative at lunch, nor for some time after; and it was not till he had been awhile in his usual arm-chair, with his whisky and soda at hand on a little table, that he began to mutter. I, who had made a point of sitting beside him, was one of the few that heard him. �There�s a lot of loose talk,� he was saying, �goes on in clubs. People say things. They don�t mean them. But they say things. A lot of loose talk.�

�Yes,� I said, �I suppose there is rather. There oughtn�t to be.�

�Of course there oughtn�t,� said Jorkens. �Now I�ll give you an instance. Only to-day; before you came in; but only to-day I heard a man saying to another (they�ve both gone out now, so never mind who they were), I heard him saying, �There�s no one tells taller tales than Jorkens.� Merely because he hasn�t travelled, or, if he has, has kept all the time to roads and paths and railways, merely because he has never been off a good wide path he thinks that things that I may have seen hundreds of times merely weren�t there.�

�Oh, he can�t really have meant it,� I said.

�No,� said Jorkens, �but he shouldn�t have said it. Now, just to prove to you, as I happen to be able to do, that his remark is definitely inaccurate, I can show you a man not a mile from here who tells very much taller stories than I do; and they happen to be perfectly true.�

�Oh, I�m sure they are,� I said, for Jorkens was distinctly annoyed.

�Care to come and see him?� said Jorkens.

�Well, I�d just as soon hear one of your own stories of things you�ve seen,� I said, �if you�d care to tell me one.�

�Not till I�ve cleared myself,� said Jorkens, �of that loose assertion.�

�Yes, I�ll come,� I said.

So we left the club together.

�I�d take a taxi,� said Jorkens, �only I happen to have run out of change.�

Though Jorkens was once a great traveller I was not sure what training he was in to walk a mile just then. So I hailed a taxi, Jorkens insisting that he must owe me the money, as it was he who was taking me. We went eastwards, and soon arrived at our destination, Jorkens generously placing himself in debt to me for the fare.

It was a small lodging house beyond Charing Cross, and we were shown upstairs by a maid to a carpetless room; and there was Jorkens�s friend Terner, a man probably still in the thirties, though he obviously smoked too much, and that made him look a bit older; and besides that he had pure-white hair, which gave a queer venerable appearance to a face that seemed somehow unsuited to it.

They greeted each other, and I was introduced.

�He has come to hear your story,� said Jorkens.

�You know I never tell it,� answered Terner.

�I know,� said Jorkens, �not to sneering fools. But he�s not one of those. He can tell when a man�s speaking the truth.�

They looked at each other, but Terner still seemed uncertain, still seemed to cling to the reticence of a man that has often been doubted.

�It�s all right,� said Jorkens. �I�ve told him lots of my tales. He�s not one of those sneering fools.�

�Told him about the Abu Laheeb?� asked Terner suddenly.

�Oh, yes,� said Jorkens.

Terner looked at me.

�A very interesting experience,� I said.

�Well,� said Terner, taking another cigarette in his stained fingers, �I don�t mind telling you. Take a chair.�

He lit his cigarette and began.

�It was in 1924; when Mars was about its nearest to the earth. I took off from Ketling aerodrome, and was away two months. Where did they think I was? I certainly hadn�t enough petrol to fly about in our atmosphere for two months. If I came down, where did I come down? It was their business to find out and to prove it; and, if not, to believe my story.�

1924, and Ketling aerodrome. I did remember now. Yes, a man had claimed to have flown to Mars; had been reluctant to say much at first, because of some horror that he had seen, would not give cheery interviews, was too grimly solemn about it, and so encouraged doubts that might otherwise not have been and was soured by them, and overwhelmed by a rush of them.

�Why, yes I remember, of course,� I said. �You flew to�.�.�.�

�A thousand letters by one post, calling me a liar,� said Terner. �So after that I refused to tell my story. They wouldn�t have believed it in any case. Mars isn�t quite what we think it.

�Well, this is what happened. I�d thought of it ever since I realised that aeroplanes could do it. But about 1920, with Mars coming nearer and nearer, and 1924 the only year that would be possible, I began my calculations. I worked at them steadily for three years; I have the figures still: I will not ask you to read them, but the whole point of my work was this, that there was only one motive power that could possibly get me to Mars before all my provisions gave out, and that power was the pace of the world. An aeroplane can do over two hundred miles an hour, and mine got up to nearly three hundred by means of the propeller alone; and in addition to that I had a rocket attachment that gradually increased my pace to an enormous extent; but the world, which is ninety-three million miles from the sun, goes right round it in a year; and nothing we know on its surface has any pace like that. My petrol and my rockets were merely to pull clear of the earth�s attraction, but my journey was made by the force that is moving you in that chair at this moment at something like a thousand miles a minute. One doesn�t lose that pace merely by leaving the earth; it remains with one. But my calculations were to direct it; and I found that the pace of the earth would only carry me to Mars when Mars was a bit ahead of us. Unfortunately Mars is never straight ahead, but a bit out to the right, and I had to calculate at what angle I was to aim my plane away to the right of our orbit, in order that the combined pull of my little plane and my rockets, and the vast pace of the earth, should give me the right direction. It had to be as precise as aiming a rifle, with this slight advantage on my side, to make up for all the forces that grudged my journey, that the target would attract any missile that was going a little too wide.

�But how to get back? That doubled the complexity of my calculations. If the pace of the world sent me forwards, so would the pace of Mars. Mars would be ahead of the world when I started. Where would the pace of Mars send me?�

I saw a flash of doubt even on Jorkens�s face at that.

�But it was fairly simple,� continued Terner. �Our world has the inside berth, a much shorter journey round the sun at ninety-three million miles than Mars at an average of a hundred and thirty-nine million. It consequently soon passes its neighbour, and I found that just as I was to shoot forward from Earth to Mars, so, by leaving at the right hour, I could shoot forwards from Mars to Earth. As I said, these calculations took me three years, and of course my life depended on them.

�There was no difficulty in taking food for two months. Water was more cumbersome; so I took the great risk of carrying water for only a month, and trusting to find it in Mars. After all, we have seen it there. It seemed a certainty, and yet it was anxiety all the while, and I drank so sparingly that, as it turned out, I had ten full days� supply when I got to Mars. A far more complicated matter was my supply of compressed air in cylinders, my method of releasing it for use and my utilisation of exhaled air to the utmost that it could be utilised.�

I was about to ask some questions about those cylinders when Jorkens interrupted. �You know my theory about Jules Verne and the men in the moon?� he said.

�No,� I replied.

�So many things he describes have been done since, and have become commonplace,� said Jorkens. �Zeppelins, submarines, and one thing and another; and are described so minutely and vividly; that it�s my theory, I don�t know what you think, that he actually experienced these, especially the trip to the moon, and then told them as fiction.�

�No, I�ve never heard that theory,� I said.

�Why not?� said Jorkens. �Why shouldn�t he? There are innumerable ways of recording events. There�s history, journalism, ballads, and many more. People don�t believe any of them very devoutly. They may disbelieve fiction too, now and then. But look how often you hear it said �That�s Little Dorrit�s home, that�s where Sam Weller lived, that�s Bleak House,� and so on and so on. That shows you they believe fiction more than most things; so why shouldn�t he have left his record in that form? But I am interrupting you. I beg your pardon.�

�Never mind,� said Terner. �Another thing that perplexed me greatly, and gave rise to immense discomfort, was the loss of pressure of the atmosphere, to which we are accustomed. I shall always regard this as the greatest of all the handicaps that anyone has to face on a journey from Earth. Indeed without the most careful and thorough binding with bandages one�s body would be crushed, by the pressure within it working outwards when the weight of the air was gone. I should have published details of all these things if it hadn�t been for that outbreak of disbelief; which would not have occurred if I had had a publicity agent.�

�Most annoying,� said Jorkens.

Terner got up and paced about the room, still smoking as always.

There certainly had been an outbreak of disbelief. It was just one of those things that the public had turned against, like Epstein�s Rima, only far more so. Some men are unlucky. It was largely his own fault. It was as he had said; if he had had a good publicity agent, the outbreak would not have occurred. They would have believed him without his troubling to make the journey at all.

He paced up and down, a few long strides, in silence.

�I spent every penny I�d got,� he went on, �on the aeroplane and the outfit. I had no dependants. And if my calculations were wrong and I missed the red planet I shouldn�t want the cash. If I found it and got safely back to Earth, I imagined it wouldn�t be hard to earn all I needed. I was mistaken there. Well, one never knows. Achievement by itself is not enough. The necessary thing is for people to admit your achievement. I had not thought of that. And the bigger the achievement, the less ready people may be to admit it. Lear was recognised much quicker than Keats.�

He lit another cigarette, as he did throughout his story as soon as he had finished one.

�Well, the planet came nearer and nearer. It was quite large now every night, distinctly coloured. Orange perhaps, rather than red. I used to go out and look at it at night. The awful thought occurred to me more than once that that orange glow might well come from a waste of deserts, yellow sand without a drop of water for me; but I was consoled by the thought of those vast canals that had been seen with our telescopes, for I believed like everyone else that they were canals.

�I had finished all my calculations by then, by the winter of 1923; and Mars, as I said, was coming nearer and nearer. I grew pretty calm about it as the time approached. All my calculations were done, and it seemed to me that any peril that threatened me was all decided months ago, one way or the other. The dangers seemed all behind me; they were in my calculations. If they were right they would take me through; if they were wrong I was doomed two or three years ago. The same way with those tawny deserts that I used to think I saw. I gave up worrying about them too. I had decided that the telescope could see better than I could, so that was the end of them. I wouldn�t tell anyone I was going; I hate to talk about things I am going to do. Apparently one has to on a stunt like that. Any way I didn�t. There was a girl I used to see a good deal of in those days. Amely her name was. I didn�t even tell her. It would have soon got out if I had. And there would I have been, the silly hero of an adventure that as yet I was only talking about. I told her I was going in my plane on a long journey. She thought I meant America. I said I would be away two months; and that puzzled her; but I wouldn�t say more.

�Every night I took a look at Mars. He was large and ruddy now, so that everyone noticed him. Just think of the different interests with which they were looking at Mars; admiration of his beauty glowing with that bright colour, casual curiosity, apathy, scientists waiting the chance that would not come round again for years, witch-doctors making spells, astrologers working out portents, reporters making their articles, and I alone looking at that distant neighbour with lonely thoughts unshared by anyone on our planet. For, as I told you, not even Amely had the very slightest idea.

�Mars was not at his nearest on the night that I started; still over forty million miles away. The reason of this I told you: I had to shoot forwards while Mars was ahead of us. He came within thirty-five million in 1924. But I set off before that.

�I started, naturally, from the night side of the earth, as Mars was lying beyond us away from the sun, and this enabled me to aim accurately at my target. It was a far trickier job coming back. When I say I aimed at my target, I aimed of course far in front of it. That will be understood by anyone who has ever done any shooting. Well, I went to Ketling aerodrome on the night in question, where my plane was. There were one or two fellows there that I knew, and of course my rig-out astonished them.

���Going to keep warm,� I remember one of them said.

�Well, I was. Because in addition to my system of bandages to hold me in when I lost the pressure of our atmosphere, I had to wrap up against the absolute cold of space. I should have that inconceivable cold in my face, while on my way back I should need all the clothes I could wear, to protect me from the blaze of the sun; for those clothes would be the only protection there was, when our fifty miles of air were behind me. Sunstroke and frost-bite could very easily have overcome me at the same moment. Well, they are very keen at Ketling about nobody going up if he�s in the least bit biffed. You know: a bit the better for his dinner. So they started asking me questions with that in view. I wouldn�t tell them where I was going. It wasn�t till I actually got the plane out that I told two of the mechanics, so as to have my start recorded. One of them merely thought I was making a joke, and laughed, not at me exactly, but in order to show that he appreciated my having a joke with him. He merely thought it was funny in some way that he couldn�t see. The other laughed too, but at least he knew what I was talking about. �How much juice are you taking, sir?� he said.

���Fifteen gallons,� I said, which as a matter of fact he knew. It�s good for three hundred miles, which gave me plenty to spare if I wanted to cruise a bit over Mars.

���Going there and back in three hours, sir?� he said.

�He was quite right. That�s as long as you can fly on fifteen gallons.

���I�m going there,� I said.

���Well, goodnight, sir,� he answered. I told a third man too.

���To Mars are you, sir,� he said. He was annoyed that I should, as he thought, play a joke on him.

�Then we were off. I had a system of sights that gave me a perfect aim all the time that I was in the darkness of Earth and within its atmosphere, and could still see Mars and still steer. Before I left our atmosphere I accelerated with my system of rockets, and broke away by a dozen explosions from the pull of our planet. Then I shut off my engines and fired no more rockets, and a most enormous stillness wrapped us about. The sun shone, and Mars and all the stars went out, and there we were perfectly still in that most absolute stillness. Yet I was moving, as you are now, at a thousand miles a minute. The Boundlessness was amazing, the discomforts beyond description; the difficulties of eating alone, without being frost-bitten, and without being crushed by the awful emptiness of space, which we are not built to inhabit, were enough to make the most resolute man turn back, except that you can neither turn nor steer without air to turn in.

�I was sure of my aim: it was accurate enough according to my calculations, the last I saw of Mars: I was pretty sure of arriving: but I soon began to doubt my capacity to hold out for a month of it. Days and nights can go by pretty slowly sometimes even on Earth, but this was interminable day.

�The compressed air worked all right: of course I had practised it on Earth. But the machinery for letting out continually the exactly right quantities into a kind of metal helmet, from which I breathed it, was so complicated, that I could never sleep for more than two hours on end, without having to wake and attend to it. For this purpose I had to have an alarm clock quite close to my ear. My discomforts would, I think, be no more interesting than a record of a long and tedious illness. But, to put it briefly, a little after halfway they got the better of me and I was going to give up and die; when suddenly I saw Mars. In the broad glare of the daylight I saw a pale white circle, like the very littlest of moons, nearly ahead of me and a bit to the right. It was this that saved me. I gazed at it and forgot my great discomforts.

�It was no more visible than a small bird�s feather, high in the air, in sunlight. But it was Mars unmistakably, and just where it ought to be if I was to reach it. With nothing else to look at through that endless day, I gazed too much at Mars. That brought it no nearer; and I found that if I was to get any comfort from it in my weariness I must look away from it for a bit. That wasn�t easy with nothing else to look at, but when I did look away from it for an hour or so, and looked again, I could see a change. I noticed now that it was not entirely lit, being dark on the right hand side, and illuminated about as much as the moon on its eleventh day, three days from full. I looked away again and then looked back at it, and so I passed about two hundred hours of that long weary day. Gradually the canals, as we call them, came in view, gradually the seas. It grew to the size of our moon, and then grew larger, exhibiting a spectacle the like of which no human eye had ever seen before. From then on I forgot my discomforts. Now I saw mountains clearly, and presently rivers, and the flashing panorama widened before me, giving up secrets at which our astronomers have guessed for over a century. There came the time when after a spell of sleep I looked at Mars again, and found that it had lost the look of a planet, or any celestial body, and appeared now like a landscape. Soon after that I got the feeling that, though my course was quite unchanged, Mars was no longer ahead of me but underneath. And then I began to feel the pull of the planet. Things rocked in my plane: kegs, tins and such; and began to shift, as far as their lashings would let them. I felt the pull too where I sat. Then I got ready for entering the atmosphere of Mars.�

�What did you have to do?� said Jorkens.

�Had to be careful,� said Terner. �Or I�d have burned up like a meteorite. Of course I was overtaking it, not meeting it, so that our two speeds largely neutralised each other; and luckily the atmosphere is only thin at first, like ours, so you don�t strike it bang. But the plane took some handling for all that. Once I�d steadied her, flying is much the same there as it is here. Of course I�d turned on my engines as soon as I struck Mars� atmosphere. I came down pretty straight, not wishing to show over too wide an area, so as not to excite too much curiosity amongst whatever might be there. I may say that I expected to find men there, not through any knowledge I had or researches I�d made, but because most people do. I don�t mean that I was persuaded by that, but what vaguely persuaded them had vaguely persuaded me. I came down over a country that was considerably covered with forests, though with plenty of clearings for a landing. The spot I chose was a clearing down in a valley, as it gave the best cover for my aeroplane, and I didn�t want to show too much. I expected human beings, but thought it just as well to keep out of sight if I could: they�re not always as friendly as all that even here. In a little over ten minutes from the time I turned on my engines I landed in this valley. I had been away from Earth a month, just as I�d calculated. It wasn�t so very unlike Earth when I stepped out. All the trees were different, and of course twigs of these were the first things I had meant to bring back. I actually picked a bunch from five different ones and laid them down in my aeroplane. But the very first thing I did was to replenish my water supply, and to have a good drink, at a stream that I had spotted before I came down, running out of the forest and down that valley. The water was all right. I had had some fear that it might be full of salt, or some wholly unknown chemical; but it was all right. And the next thing I did was to take off those infernal bandages and my breathing helmet, and to have a bath in the stream, the first I had had for a month. I didn�t put them on again, but left them in the plane, and dressed decently, as I wanted to show the inhabitants something human. After all, I would be the first one they had seen from here, and I didn�t want them to think we were like caterpillars in a cocoon. I took a .450 revolver with me too. Well, you have to do that here sometimes. Then I started off to look for these remote neighbours of ours. I passed wonderful flowers but did not stop to pick one: I was only looking for man. I had seen no sign of buildings as I came down. Yet I had not walked a mile through the wood when I came to open land, and there by the very edge of the trees, quite close to me, I saw what was clearly a building made by some intelligent being: and a very odd building it was.

�It was a long rectangle, barely fifteen feet high, and about ten yards wide. At one end of it four windowless walls and a flat roof shut out all light for about twenty yards, but the rest of it was a stretch of quite fifty yards guarded by roof and walls of open metal-work, a stout mesh of the same material of which the whole building was made.

�And at once I saw that our scientists� dreams were true, for walking in that enclosure so carefully protected by metal I saw a large party of the human race.�

�Human!� I exclaimed.

�Yes,� said Terner, �human. Folk like ourselves. And not only that, but, as I had often gathered from books was likely to be the case on account of the smaller planet cooling sooner than ours and so starting life earlier, rather more refined than the best of our people. I never saw anything more graceful; ages had given them a refinement that has not yet come to us. I never saw anything more delicate than their women�s beauty. There was a stately simplicity in their walk alone that was lovelier to see than our dances.�

Then he strode on, up and down the room, in silence awhile, smoking furiously.

�Oh, it is an accursed planet,� he said once, and went on with his rapid smoking. I was going to say something to get him back to his story; but Jorkens saw me and held up his hand. He evidently knew this point of the story, and the strong effect that it had upon Terner. So we left him awhile to his pacing and to his cigarettes.

And after a bit he continued calmly, as though there had been no pause: �When I saw that mesh I got my revolver ready, for it seemed to me a pretty obvious protection against some powerful animal. Otherwise, I thought, why not walk about in the open instead of in that narrow enclosure?

�There were about thirty of them there, dressed simply and gracefully, though their dress was a bit oriental from our point of view. Everything about them was graceful except that dingy-looking flat house. I came up to the mesh and greeted them. I knew that taking my hat off would probably have no meaning to them, but I took it off with a wide sweep and bowed. It was the best I could do, and I hoped that it might convey my feelings. And it did too. They were sympathetic and quick, and every sign that I made to them, except when too utterly clumsy, they understood at once. And when they didn�t understand they seemed to laugh at themselves, not me. They were like that. Here I was utterly crude and uncouth, half savage, compared to them; and they treated me with every courtesy that they could get my poor wits to understand. How I�d like to go back with a thousand more of us�.�.�. but it�s no good, they won�t believe me. Well, I stood there with my hands on the mesh, and found it was good stout metal though much less than half an inch wide: I could easily get my thumb through the round apertures, so that we could see each other quite clearly. Well, I stood there talking to them, or whatever you call it, as well as I could, and remembering all the time that there must be something pretty bad in those forests for all that thick wire to be necessary. I never guessed what.

�I pointed to the sky, in the direction in which they would have seen Earth shining at night; and they understood me. Fancy understanding a thing like that just from my uncouth gestures. And they obviously did. But they won�t believe me here. And then they tried to tell me all about their world, and of course I understood nothing. And it wasn�t just being ignorant of their language that I felt as my greatest handicap: it was my awful lack of every kind of refinement, in comparison with those gracious gentle creatures, that weighed on me the most heavily all the time I was there. One thing I was able to understand from them. Would you like to hear about those canals?�

�Yes, very much,� I said.

�Well, they aren�t canals at all,� he replied. �There was one in sight of where we stood, a huge expanse of water with a straight edge to it, going through flat planes. I pointed and asked them about it. And they all pointed up, and there I saw a little moon of Mars, lit up and shining like ours. Well that conveyed nothing to me. I knew Mars had two moons, but I saw no connection with canals. So I pointed to the water again, and again they all pointed up. This still conveyed absolutely nothing, so they pointed then to the far end of the great canal out in the plains; and at length after a great while I was able to see that the water was moving, which is what they were trying to explain by signs to me. Then they pointed up to their moon again. And in the end I was able to understand them. That moon passes so close over plains of mud that its attraction drags the mud along after it, and the water pours in behind. Once I had seen it, it seemed simple enough. No one would dig a canal fifty miles wide, and they are at least that. Whereas pulling water along is just the job for a moon.�

�But are the canals as wide as that?� I said.

�You�d never see them from Earth if they weren�t,� said Terner.

I�d never thought of that.

�There was one girl there that was extraordinarily lovely,� said Terner. �But to describe any of them you�d need the language of a lover, and then turn that into poetry. No one will believe me. Not a soul will believe me. I talked to her, though of course my words meant nothing; I trusted so much to her bright intelligence that I almost expected her to understand every word; and so she often did. Strange birds flew often over us going to and from the forest, and she told me the names of them in the queer Martial language. Mpah and Nto are two that I can remember, as far as I can spell it; and then there was Ingu, bright orange and black, with a long tail like our magpie. She was trying to tell me something about Ingu, who was just then flying over us, squawking, away from the trees; when suddenly she pointed. I looked, and sure enough something was coming out of the forest.

For a while he puffed away rapidly in silence.

�I can�t describe it to you. We have nothing like it here. At any rate not on land. An octopus has some slight resemblance to it in its obese body and thin long legs, though this had only two, and two long thin arms. But the head and the huge mouth were like nothing one knows. I have never seen anything so horrible. It came straight to the wire netting. I slipped away at once before it saw me, as that lovely girl was warning me to do. I had no idea that the thick wire had not been woven as a protection against this very beast I hid amongst some sort of flowering scrub. I can smell the scent of it to this day: a sweet aroma unlike any on Earth. I had no idea that they were not perfectly safe from it. And then it came straight towards them, and up to the wire. I saw it close, all nude and flabby, except for those wiry limbs. It lifted a lid in the roof before I knew what it was doing, and put in a long horrible arm. It groped about with extraordinary rapidity, and seized a girl and drew her up through the lid. I was on the far side of the wire from it and couldn�t shoot. It wrung her neck in a moment and threw her down, and slipped in that arm again. I ran out from my covert, but before I got near it had caught a young man and drawn him up, and was wringing his neck as I came round the corner. They had made little effort to avoid that gruesome hand, just dodging as it swept by them; though when it singled one out there was little chance to dodge, as they seemed to know. And they were all standing together now in the corner as I came by them, with a dignified resignation in their faces.�

�Couldn�t they have done anything?� I asked. For the idea of a branch of the human race quite helpless before such a horror was too new for me to accept it. But he had seen it, and understood.

�It was nothing more than a chicken-run,� he said. �What could they do? They belonged to this beast.�

�Belonged to it!� I exclaimed.

�You see,� said Jorkens, �you don�t understand. Man isn�t top dog there.�

�What!� I gasped.

�No,� said Terner, �that�s it.�

�Another race, you see,� said Jorkens.

�Yes,� said Terner. �It�s an older planet, you know. And somehow in all that time it�s got ahead of them.�

�What did you do?� I asked.

�Ran up to the beast,� he answered. �I somehow thought he wouldn�t be afraid of a man, from the way he treated them, so I didn�t trouble to stalk him, but just ran after him as he was moving off and swinging those two young bodies by their ankles. Then he turned round on me and reached out an arm and I let him have one from the four-fifty. He spun round and dropped the bodies and stumbled away, waving his arms above him and bleating out of his great mouth. He was evidently not accustomed to being hurt. He went bleating away and I went after him and gave him two or three more, and left him dead or dying, I didn�t care which.

�At the sound of my shots the whole wood had awoken. Birds soared up piping and whistling, and animals I had not seen began to hoot in the shadows. And amongst the general clamour I thought I detected some sounds that might have come from mouths like that of the beast I had killed. It was clearly time to go.

�I turned back to the cage, and there they were all gazing at the dead creature in silence and curiosity. I went up to them but they continued to gaze at it. None of them spoke to me. I saw then that I had done the wrong thing. It seemed that one did not kill these beasts. Only the girl I had spoken with about the birds turned to me, and she pointed swiftly up to the sky, towards Earth. The clamour was increasing in the forest. She was right: it was time to go. I said farewell to her. I wonder what my eyes told her. I said farewell more sadly than I have ever said it before. I nearly stayed. If it hadn�t been for what I had to tell our own people I would have stayed, and shared out my two dozen cartridges amongst those hideous beasts; but I thought I owed it to Earth to bring home the news. And in the end they never believed me!

�I heaved a rock at that horrible body as I went by, not liking to spare another cartridge, on account of the clamour in the forest. But those poor people in the chicken-run didn�t approve. One could see that in a moment. To be eaten by that beast was their fate, and no interference with that seemed right to them.

�I got back to my plane as fast as I could. Nothing had found it. It was still safe in the valley. Perhaps I felt a moment of regret when I found my retreat to Earth was not cut off. It would have made things so simple. And yet it would never have done. Well, there was my plane, and I jumped in and began to wrap on those bindings, without which it is impossible to keep together in the bleak emptiness between our atmosphere and theirs. Something peered out of the wood at me as it heard me get into the plane. It looked to me like some sort of fox, and I went on with my wrappings. All the noises in the wood seemed coming nearer. Then all of a sudden I thought: what if it was a dog, and not a fox at all! Whose side would a dog be on in Mars? I could hardly imagine a dog on anyone�s side but man�s. But I had seen such horrible things, that I wondered. It would go and tell them I was here. I hurried with my wrappings. But the brushwood was being trodden quite close. Then I saw branches waving. And a lot of them came pouring out of the forest, hurrying towards their chicken-run. They were not a hundred yards away, and they all saw me. Then the filthy things turned to their left and came towards me. I gave them one shot, and started my engines. One seemed hit, but I couldn�t hear its noises on account of the sound of my engines. They seemed puzzled by the shot for a moment, then came towards me, with a queer look on their hideous faces, hands stretched out. I only just cleared them. With their great height they could almost have gripped my plane as I went over them. And away I went with all my bindings flapping. Of course I couldn�t face space like that. And I couldn�t dress myself and steer at the same time, with such steering as I had to do. One degree out and I should have missed Earth. I hadn�t any petrol either. It is petrol that I had economised on. Obviously. As it was of no use to me except for about one millionth part of my journey at each end. You can�t churn up space. Well, I went about twenty miles, and lit down in the wide plain through which that moon was dragging its fifty-mile groove of mud, for us to look at through telescopes. And I had to fly up and down a good deal before I was sure of a landing in which I wouldn�t be bogged; as happened to me later. Well, I lit down and got on with my dressing. And all the while I had the idea that Mars knew a lot more about my presence there than I had hoped for. Birds seemed ill at ease, and there seemed too much scurrying. At any rate I was in the open and could see what was coming. Yet I should have liked to have gone a hundred miles or so farther, except for the uneasy feeling it gave me to be left without any reserve of petrol beyond what I knew I should want. So I stayed there and saved up my petrol; and it was lucky I did. Well, I got my bandages on, but I still had my observations to make from the sun in order to find my way home, when I saw some of those foul creatures a long way off. Whether they were coming after me or not I never knew, but they hurried my calculations, and did not encourage me to go gathering Martial rocks and flora, which of course would have made all this vehement disbelief impossible. And the samples from five different trees that I had got in the wood were of course all blown away when I went off in a hurry the first time.�

�And you brought back nothing at all?� I asked. For there was the ring of truth in his story and I was hoping it could be proved.

�Nothing except an old match-box broken in a very peculiar way. And, if you can�t see what broke it, that will prove nothing to you either. I�ll show it you later.�

�What broke it?� I asked.

�When we come to it,� he said, �you shall tell me. I�ll show it you and you shall see for yourself.�

Jorkens nodded his head.

�Well, I didn�t go gathering flowers or anything else, except for those twigs that I lost. I ought to have, I know. And perhaps I was in too much of a hurry to get away when I saw that second lot in the distance. But I had seen the faces of the beasts, and they were all I was thinking of. I had a large camera, and took a few shots at the landscape, which ought to have been conclusive. But I didn�t get it home. I�ll tell you what happened to that afterwards.

�Well, all that incredulity here was the last thing that I thought of; and the mouths of those loathsome beasts were filling all my imagination. I hurried my calculations and was off, homewards towards the sun. I saw several more of those chicken-runs as I went; but little else besides forest, and plains of mud. Very soon Mars turned a lovely cobalt blue, and the beauty of it made me even sadder.

�Then began again that long weary day, with sun and plane apparently motionless. Engines shut off, no sound, no movement, no weather; and the weeks dragging by with no sign, that time was passing at all. It is an awful place; time seems dead there.

�Again I began to despair, nearly to death; when suddenly I saw ahead of me, like a swan�s feather all alone in space, the familiar curved shape of a world, a quarter lit by the sun. There is no mistaking a planet. And yet, rejoiced as I was to be nearing home, one thing strangely perplexed me: I seemed to be ten days ahead of my time. What amazing luck, I thought, that part of my calculations must have been wrong, and yet I had not missed Earth.

�I had not seen it as soon as I had seen Mars, on account of its being so near to the line of the Sun. Consequently it was large when I did see it. As it grew larger and larger I tried to work out what continent I was approaching, not that it greatly mattered, as I had petrol enough to make a good landing unless I was very unlucky. Though it couldn�t be where I had expected to land, as I was so much ahead of my time. Well, I couldn�t make out anything, as most of the orb was in darkness. And when I got into that darkness it was a blessed thing, after the glare of the sun in that endless lonely day. For there is no light there really, only glare. In that awful loneliness there is nowhere for light to fall; it just goes by you in a glare. I got into the darkness at last and switched on my engines, and flew till I came to the very first edge of twilight that gave light enough for me to land, for I was tired of staring at the sun. And that was how I came to make a bad landing, with my wheels deep down in a marsh. It was not that that whitened my hair. I felt my scalp go cold, and my hair whitened; but it was not being stuck in a marsh that whitened it. It was the knowledge I had, the very moment I landed, that I was on the wrong planet. I should have seen it before, coming down, although in the dark: the whole thing was much too small. But I saw it now: I was on the wrong planet and didn�t even know which. The awful concentrated loneliness of the accident at first froze my thoughts. And, when I did begin to think, all was bewilderment. What lay inside of Mars? Only Earth, Venus and Mercury. The size pointed at Mercury. But I was ahead of my time, not behind it. Or was my chronometer all wrong? But the sun had appeared no larger, five minutes ago than it appears from Earth. In fact rather smaller. Perhaps, I thought, it was Venus in spite of this; though it was too small even for Venus. And the asteroids were behind me, outside Mars.

�What I did not know then was how Eros (and perhaps others too), on account of the tilt of the planes of some of the asteroids, comes at certain times within fourteen million miles of us. So that though his path round the sun lies outside Mars, whose nearest is thirty-five million, Eros at certain times is Earth�s nearest neighbour. Of this I knew nothing; and yet, when I began to think reasonably, the facts at last spoke for themselves: I was on a strayed or an unknown asteroid. It should be easier to examine such a body when one is actually on it, with its continents all spread round one, than when it appears no more than a small pin�s head in a telescope. But the calm, the safety, above all that feeling of home which lie about the astronomer, are aids to accurate thought which cannot be estimated.

�I saw that I had blundered when leaving Mars, making some wrong calculations in my hurry, and was very lucky to have got anywhere. Who can say when he thinks of all the things he might have become, who can say as I can that I nearly became a comet?�

�Very true,� said Jorkens.

Terner said this with the utmost seriousness. The danger had evidently been near to him.

�When I realised where I must be,� continued Terner, �I set to work to pull my plane out of the marsh, standing up to my knees in it. It was easier than I thought. And, when I had got it up I lifted it over my head and carried it about nine miles on to good dry land.�

�But an aeroplane?� I said. �What does it weigh?�

�Over a ton,� said Terner.

�And you carried it?�

�With one hand,� he said. �The pull of those asteroids is a weak and puny thing to anyone accustomed to Earth. I felt pretty strong on Mars, but that�s nothing to what one could do here, in Eros, or whichever it was.

�I got out at the edge of a forest of minute scrub-oak, the size of the ones that are dwarfed by the Japanese. I looked out for any disgusting beasts such as those foul things on Mars, but saw nothing of any sort. A few small moths, as I thought them, flew by me out of the trees; though, looking back on it, I think they were birds. Well, then I settled down to work out my new calculations. I was so near Earth now, that I might get it if I could pull away from the asteroid, and if only I was close in my guess (and it could be no more) at the pace that the asteroid was doing. More than a guess I could not make, for I did not even know on what little planet I was, and guesses are bad things for calculations. But you must use them when you�ve got nothing else. I knew at least where the path of these asteroids lay, so I knew how far they had to go, but the time that they took to do it I could only guess from the time that I knew their neighbours took. Had I been farther from Earth these guesses would have ruined my calculations, and I should never have found my way home.

�Well, I sat there undisturbed by anything except my own rapid breathing, and worked out those calculations as near as I could. I had to breathe three or four times as fast as one does on Earth, for there didn�t seem as much air as there is here. And of course there wouldn�t be in a little place like Eros. What troubled me far more than the breathing was the thought that I had only my engines to pull me clear of the planet, having used the last of my rockets in leaving Mars, and never guessing I should need them again. Imagine a passenger from Southampton to New York being suddenly landed on an island in the Atlantic. He would be far less surprised than I was at landing here, and I was not prepared for it. The pull of Eros, or whatever small world it was, was not much to get away from; but the amount of atmosphere I should have in which to pull away from it was bound to be diminutive also, like the planet round which it was wrapped. I knew I could get up enough speed to pull clear of Eros, if only I had long enough to do it, if only the air went far enough. I knew roughly how far it went, as I had felt it in the wings of my plane on the way down. But would it go far enough? That was the thought that was troubling me as I worked at my figures, and breathed as men breathe in high fevers. I couldn�t use my compressed air while I had air of any kind to breathe outside. For the hours that I could live before I reached Earth were numbered by my supply of compressed air. Well, I made my plans, and arranged my aim at the Earth, in leisure, such as I had not had on Mars, while the little planet spun towards the sun, and its day was dawning where I had landed in twilight. Then I had time to look round at the oak-forest, whose billowy tops were rolling away below me. Take a look now at this matchbox. Handle it gently. Now what would you say made that hole in it?�

I took from his hand a Bryant and May�s match-box, considerably shattered; shattered from the inside; leaving a hole large enough for a mouse to run through.

�It looks as if something had gone through it pretty hard,� I said.

�Not through it,� he answered. �There�s only a hole on one side.�

�Well into it,� I said.

�Nor into it. Look again,� said Terner.

Sure enough it was all burst outwards. But what had done it was more than I could see. And so I told Terner.

Then he took it over to the mantelpiece, where he had two little cottages made of china, and put it between the two, and put a little thatch over the match-box, that he had made to fit it. The little cottages on each side of it were just about the same size.

�Now what do you make of it?� he asked.

I didn�t know, and I had told him so, but I had to say something.

�It looks as if an elephant had broken out of a cottage,� I said.

Terner looked round at Jorkens, who was nodding an approving head, almost benevolent except for a certain slyness.

I didn�t understand this vehement exchange of glances.

�What?� I said.

�The very thing,� said Terner.

�An elephant?� I said.

�There were herds of them in the oak-forest,� said Terner. �I was stooping down to pick a branch of a tree to bring back, when I suddenly saw them in the dawn. They stampeded and I caught one, a magnificent tusker, and none of them bigger than mice. This I knew must be absolute proof. I threw away the branch; after all, they were only small oak-leaves; and I put the elephant into that match-box and put an elastic band round it to keep it shut. The matchbox I threw into a haversack that I wore over my bandages.

�Well, I might have collected lots more things; but, as I said, I had absolute proof, and I had hanging over me all the while, and oppressing me with its weight, that feeling that I was on the wrong planet. It is a feeling that no one who experiences it can shake off for a single moment. You, Jorkens, you have travelled a good deal too; you�ve been in deserts and queer places.�

�Yes, the papyrus marshes,� muttered Jorkens.

�But,� continued Terner, �not even there, nor far out with the Sahara all round you, can you have had so irresistibly, so unremittingly, that feeling I spoke of. It is no mere homesickness, it is an always-present overwhelming knowledge that you are in the wrong place, so strong that it amounts to a menacing warning that your very spirit repeats to you with every beat of the pulse. It is a thing I cannot explain to anyone who has not been lost outside Earth, an emotion I can share with no one.�

�Very natural,� said Jorkens.

�Well, so I got everything ready,� Terner went on, �not only for myself but for the little elephant. I had a tin into which I meant to drop him before we left the atmosphere of Eros, and I had found a way of renewing the air in it from my own breathing supply often enough to keep the little beast alive. I had a handful of green stuff, branches of oak-trees, just as one does with a caterpillar. And water and all for him. Then I threw over everything that I could do without, in order to lighten the plane for the dash away from Eros. My revolver and cartridges I threw into the marsh, and that is where my camera went too. Then I started off and flew back into the night, to the one part of Eros from which I could just see Earth, hanging low over her little neighbour�s horizon. It shone in the night of Eros like a small moon, like a cricket ball of pale turquoise set in silver. I aimed exactly, with all the allowances that I had calculated, and shot homewards flying low where the air of Eros was densest. At that low level I merely got my speed. Then came the crucial moment when I tilted upward to my aim. Would the air be heavy enough for my wings to work on? It was: I was heading in exactly the right direction, just as I got clear of night and Earth paled away. Now would the speed I had last? I couldn�t make much more in that thin air. I wondered if someone from Earth would ever find my bones, if Eros pulled me back, and my plane beside them. But I did not forget my elephant, and reached for the match-box to drop it into the tin; when I found what I�ve shown you.�

�Gone?� I said.

�Charged out, as an elephant would,� said Terner. �He must have gone before I left Eros. You see for yourself, now that you get the proper proportions, that that match-box would be to him no more than a hut of laths to one of our own elephants. And he had magnificent tusks. You wouldn�t try to shut up an elephant here in a hut of the very thinnest boards. But I never thought of that. You saw it at once. But them I had put those cottages just beside it so as to give you the right scale. Well, I didn�t grudge him his liberty at the time. I had no idea of the bitter incredulity that I should have to face. I was thinking more of the tug-of-war on which my life depended, the speed of my plane against the pull of Eros.

�And all of a sudden we did it. There was a slight rocking of all my kegs and tins as Eros let go. Then the long day started once more. I spent it mostly thinking over all the things that I was to tell our learned societies about Mars, and that asteroid which I believe to have been Eros. But they were too busy with their learning to look at a new truth. Their ears were turned to the past; they were deaf to the present. Well, well.� And he smoked in silence.

�Your aim was all right,� said Jorkens.

�Good enough,� said Terner. �Of course the pull of the Earth helped me. I suddenly saw it shining in the day, and I didn�t seem much out. Oh, what a feeling it is to be coming home. Earth pale at first, then slowly turning to silver; and growing larger and larger. Then it takes a faint touch of gold, an enormous pale-gold crescent in the sky; to the mere eye a sight of the utmost beauty, but saying something more to the whole being, which the understanding fails to grip. Perhaps one does take it in after all, but if one does one can never pass it on, never tell a soul of all that golden beauty. Words cannot do it. Music might, but I can�t play. I�d like to make a tune, you know, about Earth calling one home with all that changing light; only it would be so damned unpopular, because it is nothing like what they experience every day.

�Well, I hit it. With the help of that great pull that Earth flings out so far, I got home again. The Atlantic was the only thing I was afraid of, and I missed that by a good deal. I came down in the Sahara, which might have been little better than the Atlantic. But I got out and walked about, and hadn�t been looking round for five minutes when I came on a copper coin the size of a sixpence, and on it the head of Constantine. I had recognised the Sahara at once, but I knew then that I was in the north of it, where the old Roman Empire had been, and knew I had petrol enough to get to the towns. I started off again northwards, and flew till I saw some Arabs with a flock of sheep or goats: you can�t tell which till you are quite close. I landed near them and said I had come from England. I had no vulgar wish to astonish, as the bare truth would have done, so I said I had flown from England. And I saw that they did not believe me. I had a foretaste then of the world�s incredulity.

�Well, I got home, and I told my tale. The Press weren�t hostile at first. They interviewed me. But they wanted cheery interviews. They wanted a photograph of me waving my handkerchief up towards Mars, to friends I had left there. But how could I be cheery after seeing what I had seen? My blood grows colder even now when I think of it. And I think of it always. How could I wave my handkerchief towards those poor people, when I knew that one by one they were being eaten by a beast more foul than our imaginations can picture? I would not even smile when they photographed me. I insisted on deleting little jokes from the interviews. I became irritated. Morose, they said. Well, I was. And after that they turned against me. Bitterest of all, Amely would not believe me. When I think what we were to each other! She might have.�

�In common politeness,� said Jorkens.

�Oh, she was polite enough,� said Terner. �I asked her straight out if she believed me; and she said �I believe you absolutely.���

�Well, there you are,� said Jorkens cheerfully. �Of course she believes you.�

�No, no,� said Terner, smoking harder than ever. �No, she didn�t. When I told her about that lovely girl in Mars, she never asked me a single question. That wasn�t like Amely. Never a word about her.�

For a long time then he went up and down that room smoking with rapid puffs. For so long he was silent and quite unobservant of us that Jorkens caught my eye, and we left him alone and walked away from the house.

It was never less than half an hour after the engine stopped running that my father deigned to signal for succour. If in the process of breaking down, we had climbed, or descended, a bank, then first we must all exhaust ourselves pushing. If we had collided, there was, of course, a row. If, as had happened that day, it was simply that, while we coasted along, the machinery had ceased to churn and rattle, then my father tried his hand as a mechanic. That was the worst contingency of all: at least, it was the worst one connected with motoring.

I had learned by experience that neither rain nor snow made much difference, and certainly not fog; but that afternoon it was hotter than any day I could remember. I realised later that it was the famous long summer of 1921, when the water at the bottom of cottage wells turned salt, and when eels were found baked and edible in their mud. But to know this at the time, I should have had to read the papers, and though, through my mother�s devotion, I had the trick of reading before my third birthday, I mostly left the practice to my younger brother, Constantin. He was reading now from a pudgy volume, as thick as it was broad, and resembling his own head in size and proportion. As always, he had resumed his studies immediately the bumping of our almost springless car permitted, and even before motion had ceased. My mother sat in the front seat inevitably correcting pupils� exercises. By teaching her native German in five schools at once, three of them distant, one of them fashionable, she surprisingly managed to maintain the four of us, and even our car. The front offside door of the car leaned dangerously open into the seething highway.

�I say,� cried my father.

The young man in the big yellow racer shook his head as he tore by. My father had addressed the least appropriate car on the road.

�I say.�

I cannot recall what the next car looked like, but it did not stop.

My father was facing the direction from which we had come, and sawing the air with his left arm, like a very inexperienced policeman. Perhaps no one stopped because all thought him eccentric. Then a car going in the opposite direction came to a standstill behind my father�s back. My father perceived nothing. The motorist sounded his horn. In those days horns squealed, and I covered my ears with my hands. Between my hands and my head my long fair hair was like brittle flax in the sun.

My father darted through the traffic. I think it was the Portsmouth Road. The man in the other car got out and came to us. I noticed his companion, much younger and in a cherry-coloured cloche, begin to deal with her nails.

�Broken down?� asked the man. To me it seemed obvious, as the road was strewn with bits of the engine and oozy blobs of oil. Moreover, surely my father had explained?

�I can�t quite locate the seat of the trouble,� said my father.

The man took off one of his driving gauntlets, big and dirty.

�Catch hold for a moment.� My father caught hold.

The man put his hand into the engine and made a casual movement. Something snapped loudly.

�Done right in. If you ask me, I�m not sure she�ll ever go again.�

�Then I don�t think I�ll ask you,� said my father affably. �Hot, isn�t it?� My father began to mop his tall corrugated brow, and front-to-back ridges of grey hair.

�Want a tow?�

�Just to the nearest garage.� My father always spoke the word in perfect French.

�Where to?�

�To the nearest car repair workshop. If it would not be troubling you too much.�

�Can�t help myself now, can I?�

Three years ago I was on my way out to the East, and as an extra day in London was of some importance, I took the Friday evening mail train to Brindisi instead of the usual Thursday morning Marseilles express. Many people shrink from the long forty-eight-hour train journey through Europe, and the subsequent rush across the Mediterranean on the nineteen-knot Isis or Osiris; but there is really very little discomfort on either the train or the mail boat, and unless there is actually nothing for me to do, I always like to save the extra day and a half in London before I say good-bye to her for one of my longer tramps. This time�it was early, I remember, in the shipping season, probably about the beginning of September�there were few passengers, and I had a compartment in the P.�&�O. Indian express to myself all the way from Calais. All Sunday I watched the blue waves dimpling the Adriatic, and the pale rosemary along the cuttings; the plain white towns, with their flat roofs and their bold �duomos,� and the grey green olive orchards of Apulia. The journey was just like any other. We ate in the dining-car as often and as long as we decently could. We slept after luncheon; we dawdled the afternoon away with yellow-backed novels; sometimes we exchanged platitudes in the smoking-room, and it was there that I met Alastair Colvin.

Colvin was a man of middle height, with a resolute, well-cut jaw; his hair was turning grey; his moustache was sun-whitened, otherwise he was clean-shaven�obviously a gentleman, and obviously also a pre-occupied man. He had no great wit. When spoken to, he made the usual remarks in the right way, and I dare say he refrained from banalities only because he spoke less than the rest of us; most of the time he buried himself in the Wagon-lit Company�s time-table, but seemed unable to concentrate his attention on any one page of it. He found that I had been over the Siberian railway, and for a quarter of an hour he discussed it with me. Then he lost interest in it, and rose to go to his compartment. But he came back again very soon, and seemed glad to pick up the conversation again.

Of course this did not seem to me to be of any importance. Most travellers by train become a trifle infirm of purpose after thirty-six hours� rattling. But Colvin�s restless way I noticed in somewhat marked contrast with the man�s personal importance and dignity; especially ill suited was it to his finely made large hand with strong, broad, regular nails and its few lines. As I looked at his hand I noticed a long, deep, and recent scar of ragged shape. However, it is absurd to pretend that I thought anything was unusual. I went off at five o�clock on Sunday afternoon to sleep away the hour or two that had still to be got through before we arrived at Brindisi.

Once there, we few passengers transhipped our hand baggage, verified our berths�there were only a score of us in all�and then, after an aimless ramble of half an hour in Brindisi, we returned to dinner at the Hotel International, not wholly surprised that the town had been the death of Virgil. If I remember rightly, there is a gaily painted hall at the International�I do not wish to advertise anything, but there is no other place in Brindisi at which to await the coming of the mails�and after dinner I was looking with awe at a trellis overgrown with blue vines, when Colvin moved across the room to my table. He picked up Il Secolo, but almost immediately gave up the pretence of reading it. He turned squarely to me and said:

�Would you do me a favour?�

One doesn�t do favours to stray acquaintances on Continental expresses without knowing something more of them than I knew of Colvin. But I smiled in a non-committal way, and asked him what he wanted. I wasn�t wrong in part of my estimate of him; he said bluntly:

�Will you let me sleep in your cabin on the Osiris?� And he coloured a little as he said it.

Now, there is nothing more tiresome than having to put up with a stable-companion at sea, and I asked him rather pointedly:

�But surely there is room for all of us?� I thought that perhaps he had been partnered off with some angry Levantine, and wanted to escape from him ta all hazards.

Colvin, still somewhat confused, said: �Yes; I am in a cabin by myself. But you would do me the greatest favour if you would allow me to share yours.�

This was all very well, but, besides the fact that I always sleep better when alone, there had been some recent thefts on board English liners, and I hesitated, frank and honest and self-conscious as Colvin was. Just then the mail-train came in with a clatter and a rush of escaping steam, and I asked him to see me again about it on the boat when we started. He answered me curtly�I suppose he saw the mistrust in my manner��I am a member of White�s.� I smiled to myself as he said it, but I remembered in a moment that the man�if he were really what he claimed to be, and I make no doubt that he was�must have been sorely put to it before he urged the fact as a guarantee of his respectability to a total stranger at a Brindisi hotel.

That evening, as we cleared the red and green harbour-lights of Brindisi, Colvin explained. This is his story in his own words.

It�s curious how things are forgotten, on the river. Has it ever struck you? People live and die upon its banks, ships come and go upon its muddy waters, and of them all hardly the names survive the morrow. Love and crime, despair and death, make the city with every flood and pass out with every ebb, but they scarcely leave a ripple on the secret river; it flows on and forgets them all.

A bare ten years have slipped by since Nightmare Jack was last seen about the docks, yet I would lay you long odds that, save for his deformity, he might walk to-day from Poplar to the Isle of Dogs and pass unrecognised. Even he, whom we thought unforgettable, the little, hare-lipped man with the hoarse voice of clutching terror, victim of the strange, incessant dream.

It is as well that he cannot come back. He dreams no longer. We who gave him to the keeping of the river can sleep the sounder knowing that the brown waters hold him fast�.�.�.

By the light of a tallow candle which had been placed on one end of a rough table a man was reading something written in a book. It was an old account-book, greatly worn; and the writing was not, apparently, very legible, for the man sometimes held the page close to the flame of the candle to get a stronger light on it. The shadow of the book would then throw into obscurity a half of the room, darkening a number of faces and figures; for besides the reader, eight other men were present. Seven of them sat against the rough log walls, silent, motionless, and the room being small, not very far from the table. By extending an arm anyone of them could have touched the eighth man, who lay on the table, face upward, partly covered by a sheet, his arms at his sides. He was dead.

The man with the book was not reading aloud, and no one spoke; all seemed to be waiting for something to occur; the dead man only was without expectation. From the blank darkness outside came in, through the aperture that served for a window, all the ever unfamiliar noises of night in the wilderness�the long nameless note of a distant coyote; the stilly pulsing thrill of tireless insects in trees; strange cries of night birds, so different from those of the birds of day; the drone of great blundering beetles, and all that mysterious chorus of small sounds that seem always to have been but half heard when they have suddenly ceased, as if conscious of an indiscretion. But nothing of all this was noted in that company; its members were not overmuch addicted to idle interest in matters of no practical importance; that was obvious in every line of their rugged faces�obvious even in the dim light of the single candle. They were evidently men of the vicinity�farmers and woodsmen.

The person reading was a trifle different; one would have said of him that he was of the world, worldly, albeit there was that in his attire which attested a certain fellowship with the organisms of his environment. His coat would hardly have passed muster in San Francisco; his foot-gear was not of urban origin, and the hat that lay by him on the floor (he was the only one uncovered) was such that if one had considered it as an article of mere personal adornment one would have missed its meaning. In countenance the man was rather prepossessing, with just a hint of sternness; though that he may have assumed or cultivated, as appropriate to one in authority. For he was a coroner. It was by virtue of his office that he had possession of the book in which he was reading; it had been found among the dead man�s effects�in his cabin, where the inquest was now taking place.

When the coroner had finished reading he put the book into his breast-pocket. At that moment the door was pushed open and a young man entered. He, clearly, was not of mountain birth, and breeding: he was clad as those who dwell in cities. His clothing was dusty, however, as from travel. He had, in fact, been riding hard to attend the inquest.

The coroner nodded; no one else greeted him.

�We have waited for you,� said the coroner. �It is necessary to have done with this business to-night.�

The young man smiled. �I am sorry to have kept you,� he said. �I went away, not to evade your summons, but to post to my newspaper an account of what I suppose I am called back to relate.�

The coroner smiled.

�The account that you posted to your newspaper,� he said, �differs, probably, from that which you will give here under oath.�

�That,� replied the other, rather hotly and with a visible flush, �is as you please. I used manifold paper and have a copy of what I sent. It was not written as news, for it is incredible, but as fiction. It may go as a part of my testimony under oath.�

�But you say it is incredible.�

�That is nothing to you, sir, if I also swear that it is true.�

The coroner was silent for a time, his eyes upon the floor. The men about the sides of the cabin talked in whispers, but seldom withdrew their gaze from the face of the corpse. Presently the coroner lifted his eyes and said: �We will resume the inquest.�

The men removed their hats. The witness was sworn.

�What is your name?� the coroner asked.

�William Harker.�

�Age?�

�Twenty-seven.�

�You knew the deceased, Hugh Morgan?�

�Yes.�

�You were with him when he died?�

�Near him.�

�How did that happen�your presence, I mean?�

�I was visiting him at this place to shoot and fish. A part of my purpose, however, was to study him and his odd, solitary way of life. He seemed a good model for a character in fiction. I sometimes write stories.�

�I sometimes read them.�

�Thank you.�

�Stories in general�not yours.�

Some of the jurors laughed. Against a sombre background humour shows high lights. Soldiers in the intervals of battle laugh easily, and a jest in the death-chamber conquers by surprise.

�Relate the circumstances of this man�s death,� said the coroner. �You may use any notes or memoranda that you please.�

The witness understood. Pulling a manuscript from his breast-pocket he held it near the candle and turning the leaves until he found the passage that he wanted to read.

�.�.�.�.�The sun had hardly risen when we left the house. We were looking for quail, each with a shotgun, but we had only one dog. Morgan said that our best ground was beyond a certain ridge that he pointed out, and we crossed it by a trail through the chaparral. On the other side was comparatively level ground, thickly covered with wild oats. As we emerged from the chaparral Morgan was but a few yards in advance. Suddenly we heard, at a little distance to our right and partly in front, a noise as of some animal thrashing about in the bushes, which we could see were violently agitated.

���We�ve started a deer,� I said, �I wish we had brought a rifle.�

�Morgan, who had stopped and was intently watching the agitated chaparral, said nothing, but had cocked both barrels of his gun and was holding it in readiness to aim. I thought him a trifle excited, which surprised me, for he had a reputation for exceptional coolness, even in moments of sudden and imminent peril.

���Oh, come,� I said. �You are not going to fill up a deer with quail-shot, are you?�

�Still he did not reply; but catching a sight of his face as he turned it slightly toward me I was struck by the intensity of his look. Then I understood that we had serious business in hand, and my first conjecture was that we had �jumped� a grizzly. I advanced to Morgan�s side, cocking my piece as I moved.

�The bushes were now quiet and the sounds had ceased, but Morgan was as attentive to the place as before.

���What is it? What the devil is it?� I asked.

���The Damned Thing!� he replied, without turning his head. His voice was husky and unnatural. He trembled visibly.

�I was about to speak further, when I observed the wild oats near the place of the disturbance moving in the most inexplicable way. I can hardly describe it. It seemed as if stirred by a streak of wind, which not only bent it, but pressed it down�crushed it so that it did not rise; and this movement was slowly prolonging itself directly toward us.

�Nothing that I had ever seen had affected me so strangely as this unfamiliar and unaccountable phenomenon, yet I am unable to recall any sense of fear. I remember�and tell it here because, singularly enough, I recollected it then�that once in looking carelessly out of an open window I momentarily mistook a small tree close at hand for one of a group of larger trees at a little distance away. It looked the same size as the others, but being more distinctly and sharply defined in mass and detail seemed out of harmony with them. It was a mere falsification of the law of aerial perspective, but it startled, almost terrified me. We so rely upon the orderly operation of familiar natural laws that any seeming suspension of them is noted as a menace to our safety, a warning of unthinkable calamity. So now the apparently causeless movement of the herbage and the slow, undeviating approach of the line of disturbance were distinctly disquieting. My companion appeared actually frightened, and I could hardly credit my senses when I saw him suddenly throw his gun to his shoulder and fire both barrels at the agitated grain! Before the smoke of the discharge had cleared away I heard a loud savage cry�a scream like that of a wild animal�and flinging his gun upon the ground Morgan sprang away and ran swiftly from the spot. At the same instant I was thrown violently to the ground by the impact of something unseen in the smoke�some soft, heavy substance that seemed thrown against me with great force.

�Before I could get upon my feet and recover my gun, which seemed to have been struck from my hands, I heard Morgan crying out as if in mortal agony, and mingling with his cries were such hoarse, savage sounds as one hears from fighting dogs. Inexpressibly terrified, I struggled to my feet and looked in the direction of Morgan�s retreat; and may Heaven in mercy spare me from another sight like that! At a distance of less than thirty yards was my friend, down on one knee, his head thrown back at a frightful angle, hatless, his long hair in disorder and his whole body in violent movement from side to side, backward and forward. His right arm was lifted and seemed to lack the hand�at least, I could see none. The other arm was invisible. At times, as my memory now reports this extraordinary scene, I could discern but a part of his body; it was as if he had been partly blotted out�I cannot otherwise express it�then a shifting of his position would bring it all into view again.

�All this must have occurred within a few seconds, yet in that time Morgan assumed all the postures of a determined wrestler vanquished by superior weight and strength. I saw nothing but him, and him not always distinctly. During the entire incident his shouts and curses were heard, as if through an enveloping uproar of such sounds of rage and fury as I had never heard from the throat of man or brute!

�For a moment only I stood irresolute, then throwing down my gun I ran forward to my friend�s assistance. I had a vague belief that he was suffering from a fit, or some form of convulsion. Before I could reach his side he was down and quiet. All sounds had ceased, but with a feeling of such terror as even these awful events had not inspired I now saw again the mysterious movement of the wild oats, prolonging itself from the trampled area about the prostrate man towards the edge of a wood. It was only when it had reached the wood that I was able to withdraw my eyes and look at my companion. He was dead.�

The coroner rose from his seat and stood beside the dead man. Lifting an edge of the sheet he pulled it away, exposing the entire body, altogether naked and showing in the candlelight a clay-like yellow. It had, however, broad maculations of bluish black, obviously caused by extravasated blood from contusions. The chest and sides looked as if they had been beaten with a bludgeon. There were dreadful lacerations; the skin was torn in strips and shreds.

The coroner moved round to the end of the table and undid a silk handkerchief which had been passed under the chin and knotted on the top of the head. When the handkerchief was drawn away it exposed what had been the throat. Some of the jurors who had risen to get a better view repented their curiosity and turned away their faces. Witness Harker went to the open window and leaned out across the sill, faint and sick. Dropping the handkerchief upon the dead man�s neck the coroner stepped to an angle of the room and from a pile of clothing produced one garment after another, each of which he held up a moment for inspection. All were torn, and stiff with blood. The jurors did not make a closer inspection. They seemed rather uninterested. They had, in truth, seen all this before; the only thing that was new to them being Harker�s testimony.

�Gentlemen,� the coroner said, �we have no more evidence, I think. Your duty has been already explained to you; if there is nothing you wish to ask you may go outside and consider your verdict.�

The foreman rose�a tall, bearded man of sixty, coarsely clad.

�I should like to ask one question, Mr.�Coroner,� he said. �What asylum did this yer last witness escape from?�

�Mr.�Harker,� said the coroner gravely and tranquilly, �from what asylum did you last escape?�

Harker flushed crimson again, but said nothing, and the seven jurors rose and solemnly filed out of the cabin.

�If you have done insulting me, sir,� said Harker, as soon as he and the officer were left alone with the dead man, �I suppose I am at liberty to go?�

�Yes.�

Harker started to leave, but paused, with his hand on the door-latch. The habit of his profession was strong in him�stronger than his sense of personal dignity. He turned about and said:

�The book that you have there�I recognise it as Morgan�s diary. You seemed greatly interested in it; you read in it while I was testifying. May I see it? The public would like���

�The book will cut no figure in this matter,� replied the official, slipping it into his coat pocket; �all the entries in it were made before the writer�s death.�

As Harker passed out of the house the jury re-entered and stood about the table, on which the now covered corpse showed under the sheet a sharp definition. The foreman seated himself near the candle, produced from his breast-pocket a pencil and scrap of paper and wrote rather laboriously the following verdict, which with various degrees of effort all signed:

In the diary of the late Hugh Morgan are certain interesting entries having, possibly, a scientific value as suggestions. At the inquest upon his body the book was not put in evidence; possibly the coroner thought it not worth while to confuse the jury. The date of the first of the entries mentioned cannot be ascertained; the upper part of the leaf is torn away; the part of the entry remaining follows:

Several weeks� entries are missing, three leaves being torn from the book.

�Oh, there is one, of course, but you�ll never know it.� The assertion, laughingly flung out six months earlier in a bright June garden, came back to Mary Boyne with a new perception of its significance as she stood, in the December dusk, waiting for the lamps to be brought into the library.

The words had been spoken by their friend Alida Stair, as they sat at tea on her lawn at Pangbourne, in reference to the very house of which the library in question was the central, the pivotal �feature.� Mary Boyne and her husband, in the quest of a country place in one of the southern or southwestern counties, had, on their arrival in England, carried their problem straight to Alida Stair, who had successfully solved it in her own case; but it was not until they had rejected, almost capriciously, several practical and judicious suggestions that she threw out: �Well, there�s Lyng, in Dorsetshire. It belongs to Hugo�s cousins, and you can get it for a song.�

The reason she gave for its being obtainable on these terms�its remoteness from a station, its lack of electric light, hot-water pipes, and other vulgar necessities�were exactly those pleading in its favour with two romantic Americans perversely in search of the economic drawbacks which were associated, in their tradition, with unusual architectural felicities.

�I should never believe I was living in an old house unless I was thoroughly uncomfortable,� Ned Boyne, the more extravagant of the two, had jocosely insisted; �the least hint of �convenience� would make me think it had been bought out of an exhibition, with the pieces numbered, and set up again.� And they had proceeded to enumerate, with humorous precision, their various doubts and demands, refusing to believe that the house their cousin recommended was really Tudor till they learned it had no heating system, or that the village church was literally in the grounds till she assured them of the deplorable uncertainty of the water-supply.

�It�s too uncomfortable to be true!� Edward Boyne had continued to exult as the avowal of each disadvantage was successively wrung from her; but he had cut short his rhapsody to ask, with a relapse to distrust: �And the ghost? You�ve been concealing from us the fact that there is no ghost!�

Mary, at the moment, had laughed with him, yet almost with her laugh, being possessed of several sets of independent perceptions, had been struck by a note of flatness in Alida�s answering hilarity.

�Oh, Dorsetshire�s full of ghosts, you know.�

�Yes, yes; but that won�t do. I don�t want to have to drive ten miles to see somebody else�s ghost. I want one of my own on the premises. Is there a ghost at Lyng?�

His rejoinder had made Alida laugh again, and it was then that she had flung back tantalisingly: �Oh, there is one, of course, but you�ll never know it.�

�Never know it?� Boyne pulled her up. �But what in the world constitutes a ghost except the fact of its being known for one?�

�I can�t say. But that�s the story.�

�That there�s a ghost, but that nobody knows it�s a ghost?�

�Well�not till afterward, at any rate.�

�Till afterward?�

�Not till long afterward.�

�But if it�s once been identified as an unearthly visitant, why hasn�t its signalement been handed down in the family? How has it managed to preserve its incognito?�

Alida could only shake her head. �Don�t ask me. But it has.�

�And then suddenly��Mary spoke up as if from cavernous depths of divination��suddenly, long afterward, one says to one�s self �That was it�?�

She was startled at the sepulchral sound with which her question fell on the banter of the other two, and she saw the shadow of the same surprise flit across Alida�s pupils. �I suppose so. One just has to wait.�

�Oh, hang waiting!� Ned broke in. �Life�s too short for a ghost who can only be enjoyed in retrospect. Can�t we do better than that, Mary?�

But it turned out that in the event they were not destined to, for within three months of their conversation with Mrs.�Stair they were settled at Lyng, and the life they had yearned for, to the point of planning it in advance in all its daily details, had actually begun for them.

It was to sit, in the thick December dusk, by just such a wide-hooded fireplace, under such black oak rafters, with the sense that beyond the mullioned panes the downs were darkened to a deeper solitude: it was for the ultimate indulgence of such sensations that Mary Boyne, abruptly exiled from New York by her husband�s business, had endured for nearly fourteen years the soul-deadening ugliness of a Middle Western town, and that Boyne had ground on doggedly at his engineering till, with a suddenness that still made her blink, the prodigious windfall of the Blue Star Mine had put them at a stroke in possession of life and the leisure to taste it. They had never for a moment meant their new state to be one of idleness; but they meant to give themselves only to harmonious activities. She had her vision of painting and gardening (against a background of grey wails), he dreamed of the production of his long-planned book on the Economic Basis of Culture; and with such absorbing work ahead no existence could be too sequestered: they could not get far enough from the world, or plunge deep enough into the past.

Dorsetshire had attracted them from the first by an air of remoteness out of all proportion to its geographical position. But to the Boynes it was one of the ever-recurring wonders of the whole incredibly compressed island�a nest of counties, as they put it�that for the production of its effects so little of a given quality went so far: that so few miles made a distance, and so short a distance a difference.

�It�s that,� Ned had once enthusiastically explained, �that gives such depth to their effects, such relief to their contrasts. They�ve been able to lay the butter so thick on every delicious mouthful.�

The butter had certainly been laid on thick at Lyng: the old house hidden under a shoulder of the downs had almost all the finer marks of commerce with a protracted past. The mere fact that it was neither large nor exceptional made it, to the Boynes, abound the more completely in its special charm�the charm of having been for centuries a deep dim reservoir of life. The life had probably not been of the most vivid order: for long periods, no doubt, it had fallen as noiselessly into the past as the quiet drizzle of autumn fell, hour after hour, into the fish-pond between the yews; but these back-waters of existence sometimes breed, in their sluggish depths, strange acuities of emotion, and Mary Boyne had felt from the first the mysterious stir of intenser memories.

The feeling had never been stronger than on this particular afternoon when, waiting in the library for the lamps to come, she rose from her seat and stood among the shadows of the hearth. Her husband had gone off, after luncheon, for one of his long tramps on the downs. She had noticed of late that he preferred to go alone; and, in the tried security of their personal relations, had been driven to conclude that his book was bothering him, and that he needed the afternoons to turn over in solitude the problems left from the morning�s work. Certainly the book was not going as smoothly as she had thought it would, and there were lines of perplexity between his eyes such as had never been there in his engineering days. He had often, then, looked fagged to the verge of illness, but the native demon of �worry� had never branded his brow. Yet the few pages he had so far read to her�the introduction, and a summary of the opening chapter�showed a firm hold on his subject, and an increasing confidence in his powers.

The fact threw her into deeper perplexity, since, now that he had done with �business� and its disturbing contingencies, the one other possible source of anxiety was eliminated. Unless it were his health, then? But physically he had gained since they had come to Dorsetshire, grown robuster, ruddier and fresher-eyed. It was only within the last week that she had felt in him the undefinable change which made her restless in his absence, and as tongue-tied in his presence as though it were she who had a secret to keep from him!

The thought that there was a secret somewhere between them struck her with a sudden rap of wonder, and she looked about her down the long room.

�Can it be the house?� she mused.

The room itself might have been full of secrets. They seemed to be piling themselves up, as evening fell, like the layers and layers of velvet shadow dropping from the low ceiling, the row of books, the smoke-blurred sculpture of the hearth.

�Why, of course�the house is haunted!� she reflected.

The ghost�Alida�s imperceptible ghost�after figuring largely in the banter of their first month or two at Lyng, had been gradually left aside as too ineffectual for imaginative use. Mary had, indeed, as became the tenant of a haunted house, made the customary inquiries among her rural neighbours, but, beyond a vague �They do say so, Ma�am,� the villagers had nothing to impart. The elusive spectre had apparently never had sufficient identity for a legend to crystallise about it, and after a time the Boynes had set the matter down to their profit-and-loss account, agreeing that Lyng was one of the few houses good enough in itself to dispense with supernatural enhancements.

�And I suppose, poor ineffectual demon, that�s why it beats its beautiful wings in vain in the void,� Mary had laughingly concluded.

�Or, rather,� Ned answered in the same strain, �why, amid so much that�s ghostly, it can never affirm its separate existence as the ghost.� And thereupon their invisible housemate had finally dropped out of their references, which were numerous enough to make them soon unaware of the loss.

Now, as she stood on the hearth, the subject of their earlier curiosity revived in her with a new sense of its meaning�a sense gradually acquired through daily contact with the scene of the lurking mystery. It was the house itself, of course, that possessed the ghost-seeing faculty, that communed visually but secretly with its own past; if one could only get into close enough communion with the house, one might surprise its secret, and acquire the ghost-sight on one�s own account. Perhaps, in his long hours in this very room, where she never trespassed till the afternoon, her husband had acquired it already, and was silently carrying about the weight of whatever it had revealed to him. Mary was too well versed in the code of the spectral world not to know that one could not talk about the ghosts one saw: to do so was almost as great a breach of taste as to name a lady in a club. But this explanation did not really satisfy her. �What, after all, except for the fun of the shudder,� she reflected, �would he really care for any of their old ghosts?� And thence she was thrown back once more on to the fundamental dilemma: the fact that one�s greater or less susceptibility to spectral influences had no particular bearing on the case, since, when one did see a ghost at Lyng, one did not know it.

�Not till long afterward,� Alida Stair had said. Well, supposing Ned had seen one when they first came, and had known only within the last week what had happened to him? More and more under the spell of the hour, she threw back her thoughts to the early days of their tenancy, but at first only to recall a lively confusion of unpacking, settling, arranging of books, and calling to each other from remote corners of the house as, treasure after treasure, it revealed itself to them. It was in this particular connection that she presently recalled a certain soft afternoon of the previous October, when, passing from the first rapturous flurry of exploration to a detailed inspection of the old house, she had pressed (like a novel heroine) a panel that opened on a flight of corkscrew stairs leading to a flat ledge of the roof�the roof which, from below, seemed to slope away on all sides too abruptly for any but practised feet to scale.

The view from this hidden coign was enchanting, and she had flown down to snatch Ned from his papers and give him the freedom of her discovery. She remembered still how, standing at her side, he had passed his arm about her while their gaze flew to the long tossed horizon-line of the downs, and then dropped contentedly back to trace the arabesque of yew hedges about the fish-pond, and the shadow of the cedar on the lawn.

�And now the other way,� he had said, turning her about within his arm; and closely pressed to him, she had absorbed, like some long satisfying draught, the picture of the grey-walled court, the squat lions on the gates, and the lime-avenue reaching up to the high road under the downs.

It was just then, while they gazed and held each other, that she had felt his arm relax, and heard a sharp �Hullo!� that made her turn to glance at him.

Distinctly, yes, she now recalled that she had seen, as she glanced, a shadow of anxiety, of perplexity, rather, fall across his face; and, following his eyes, had beheld the figure of a man�a man in loose greyish clothes, as it appeared to her�who was sauntering down the lime-avenue to the court with the doubtful gait of a stranger who seeks his way. Her short-sighted eyes had given her but a blurred impression of slightness and greyishness, with something foreign, or at least unlocal, in the cut of the figure or its dress; but her husband had apparently seen more�seen enough to make him push past her with a hasty �Wait!� and dash down the stairs without pausing to give her a hand.

A slight tendency to dizziness obliged her, after a provisional clutch at the chimney against which they had been leaning, to follow him first more cautiously; and when she had reached the landing she paused again, for a less definite reason, leaning over the banister to strain her eyes through the silence of the brown sun-flecked depths. She lingered there till, somewhere in those depths, she heard the closing of a door; then, mechanically impelled, she went down the shallow flight of steps till she reached the lower hall.

The front door stood open on the sunlight of the court, and hall and court was empty. The library door was open, too, and after listening in vain for any sound of voices within, she crossed the threshold, and found her husband alone, vaguely fingering the papers on his desk.

He looked up, as if surprised at her entrance, but the shadow of anxiety had passed from his face, leaving it even, as she fancied, a little brighter and clearer than usual.

�What is it? Who was it?� she asked.

�Who?� he repeated, with the surprise still all on his side.

�The man we saw coming toward the house.�

He seemed to reflect. �The man? Why, I thought I saw Peters; I dashed after him to say a word about the stable drains, but he had disappeared before I could get down.�

�Disappeared? But he seemed to be walking so slowly when we saw him.�

Boyne shrugged his shoulders. �So I thought; but he must have got up steam in the interval. What do you say to our trying a scramble up Meldon Steep before sunset?�

That was all. At the time the occurrence had been less than nothing, had, indeed, been immediately obliterated by the magic of their first vision from Meldon Steep, a height which they had dreamed of climbing ever since they had first seen its bare spine rising above the roof of Lyng. Doubtless it was the mere fact of the other incident�s having occurred on the very day of their ascent to Meldon that had kept it stored away in the fold of memory from which it now emerged; for in itself it had no mark of the portentous. At the moment there could have been nothing more natural than that Ned should dash himself from the roof in pursuit of dilatory tradesmen. It was the period when they were always on the watch for one or the other of the specialists employed about the place; always lying in wait for them, and rushing out at them with questions, reproaches or reminders. And certainly in the distance the grey figure had looked like Peters.

Yet now, as she reviewed the scene, she felt her husband�s explanation of it to have been invalidated by the look of anxiety on his face. Why had the familiar appearance of Peters made him anxious? Why, above all, if it was of such prime necessity to confer with him on the subject of the stable drains, had the failure to find him produced such a look of relief? Mary could not say that any one of these questions had occurred to her at the time, yet, from the promptness with which they now marshalled themselves at her summons, she had a sense that they must all along have been there, waiting their hour.

Weary with her thoughts, she moved to the window. The library was now quite dark, and she was surprised to see how much faint light the outer world still held.

As she peered out into it across the court, a figure shaped itself far down the perspective of bare limes: it looked a mere blot of deeper grey in the greyness, and for an instant, as it moved toward her, her heart thumped to the thought �It�s the ghost!�

She had time, in that long instant, to feel suddenly that the man of whom, two months earlier, she had had a distant vision from the roof, was now, at his predestined hour, about to reveal himself as not having been Peters; and her spirit sank under the impending fear of the disclosure. But almost with the next tick of the clock the figure, gaining substance and character, showed itself even to her weak sight as her husband�s; and she turned to meet him, as he entered, with the confession of her folly.

�It�s really too absurd,� she laughed out, �but I never can remember!�

�Remember what?� Boyne questioned as they drew together.

�That when one sees the Lyng ghost one never knows it.�

Her hand was on his sleeve, and he kept it there, but with no response in his gesture or in the lines of his preoccupied face.

�Did you think you�d seen it?� he asked, after an appreciable interval.

�Why, I actually took you for it, my dear, in my mad determination to spot it!�

�Me�just now?� His arm dropped away, and he turned from her with the faint echo of her laugh. �Really, dearest, you�d better give it up, if that�s the best you can do.�

�Oh, yes, I give it up. Have you?� she asked, turning round on him abruptly.

The parlour-maid had entered with letters and a lamp, and the light struck up into Boyne�s face as he bent above the tray she presented.

�Have you?� Mary perversely insisted, when the servant had disappeared on her errand of illumination.

�Have I what?� he rejoined absently, the light bringing out the sharp stamp of worry between his brows as he turned over the letters.

�Given up trying to see the ghost.� Her heart beat a little at the experiment she was making.

Her husband, laying his letters aside, moved away into the shadow of the hearth.

�I never tried,� he said, tearing open the wrapper of a newspaper.

�Well, of course,� Mary persisted, �the exasperating thing is that there�s no use trying, since one can�t be sure till so long afterward.�

He was unfolding the paper as if he had hardly heard her; but after a pause, during which the sheets rustled spasmodically between his hands, he looked up to ask, �Have you any idea how long?�

Mary had sunk into a low chair beside the fireplace. From her seat she glanced over, startled, at her husband�s profile, which was projected against the circle of lamplight.

�No; none. Have you?� she retorted, repeating her former phrase with an added stress of intention.

Boyne crumpled the paper into a bunch, and then, inconsequently, turned back with it toward the lamp.

�Lord, no! I only meant,� he explained, with a faint tinge of impatience, �is there any legend, any tradition, as to that?�

�Not that I know of,� she answered; but the impulse to add �What makes you ask?� was checked by the reappearance of the parlour-maid, with tea and a second lamp.

With the dispersal of shadows, and the repetition of the daily domestic office, Mary Boyne felt herself less oppressed by that sense of something mutely imminent which had darkened her afternoon. For a few moments she gave herself to the details of her task, and when she looked up from it she was struck to the point of bewilderment by the change in her husband�s face. He had seated himself near the farther lamp, and was absorbed in the perusal of his letters; but was it something he had found in them, or merely the shifting of her own point of view, that had restored his features to their normal aspect? The longer she looked the more definitely the change affirmed itself. The lines of tension had vanished, and such traces of fatigue as lingered were of the kind easily attributable to steady mental effort. He glanced up, as if drawn by her gaze, and met her eyes with a smile.

�I�m dying for my tea, you know; and here�s a letter for you,� he said.

She took the letter he held out in exchange for the cup she proffered him, and, returning to her seat, broke the seal with the languid gesture of the reader whose interests are all enclosed in the circle of one cherished presence.

Her next conscious motion was that of starting to her feet, the letter falling to them as she rose, while she held out to her husband a newspaper clipping.

�Ned! What�s this? What does it mean?�

He had risen at the same instant, almost as if hearing her cry before she uttered it; and for a perceptible space of time he and she studied each other, like adversaries watching for an advantage, across the space between her chair and his desk.

�What�s what? You fairly made me jump!� Boyne said at length, moving toward her with a sudden half-exasperated laugh. The shadow of apprehension was on his face again, not now a look of fixed foreboding, but shifting vigilance of lips and eyes that gave her the sense of his feeling himself invisibly surrounded.

Her hand shook so that she could hardly give him the clipping.

�This article�from the Waukesha Sentinel�that a man named Elwell has brought suit against you�that there was something wrong about the Blue Star Mine. I can�t understand more than half.�

They continued to face each other as she spoke, and to her astonishment she saw that her words had the almost immediate effect of dissipating the strained watchfulness of his look.

�Oh, that!� He glanced down the printed slip, and then folded it with the gesture of one who handles something harmless and familiar. �What�s the matter with you this afternoon, Mary? I thought you�d got bad news.�

She stood before him with her undefinable terror subsiding slowly under the reassurance of his tone.

�You knew about this, then�it�s all right?�

�Certainly I knew about it; and it�s all right.�

�But what is it? I don�t understand. What does this man accuse you of?�

�Pretty nearly every crime in the calendar.� Boyne had tossed the clipping down, and thrown himself into an armchair near the fire. �Do you want to hear the story? It�s not particularly interesting�just a squabble over interests in the Blue Star.�

�But who is this Elwell? I don�t know the name.�

�Oh, he�s a fellow I put into it�gave him a hand up. I told you all about him at the time.�

�I dare say. I must have forgotten.� Vainly she strained back among her memories. �But if you helped him, why does he make this return?�

�Probably some shyster lawyer got hold of him and talked him over. It�s all rather technical and complicated. I thought that kind of thing bored you.�

His wife felt a sting of compunction. Theoretically, she deprecated the American wife�s detachment from her husband�s professional interests, but in practice she had always found it difficult to fix her attention on Boyne�s report of the transactions in which his varied interests involved him. Besides, she had felt during their years of exile, that, in a community where the amenities of living could be obtained only at the cost of efforts as arduous as her husband�s professional labours, such brief leisure as he and she could command should be used as an escape from immediate preoccupations, a flight to the life they always dreamed of living. Once or twice, now that this new life had actually drawn its magic circle about them, she had asked herself if she had done right; but hitherto such conjectures had been no more than the retrospective excursions of an active fancy. Now for the first time, it startled her a little to find how little she knew of the material foundation on which her happiness was built.

She glanced at her husband, and was again reassured by the composure of his face; yet she felt the need of more definite grounds for her reassurance.

�But doesn�t this suit worry you? Why have you never spoken to me about it?�

He answered both questions at once. �I didn�t speak of it at first because it did worry me, rather. But it�s all ancient history now. Your correspondent must have got hold of a back number of the Sentinel.�

She felt a quick thrill of relief. �You mean it�s all over? He�s lost his case?�

There was a just perceptible delay in Boyne�s reply. �The suit�s been withdrawn�that�s all.�

But she persisted, as if to exonerate herself from the inward charge of being too easily put off. �Withdrawn it because he saw he had no chance?�

�Oh, he had no chance,� Boyne answered.

She was still struggling with a dimly felt perplexity at the back of her thoughts.

�How long ago was it withdrawn?�

He paused, as if with a slight return of his former uncertainty. �I�ve just had the news now; but I�ve been expecting it.�

�Just now�in one of your letters?�

�Yes; in one of my letters.�

She made no answer, and was aware only, after a short interval of waiting, that he had risen, and, strolling across the room, had placed himself on the sofa at her side. She felt his hand seek hers and clasp it, and turning slowly, drawn by the warmth of his cheek, she met his smiling eyes.

�It�s all right�it�s all right?� she questioned, through the flood of her dissolving doubts; and �I give you my word it was never righter!� he laughed back at her, holding her close.

One of the strangest things she was afterwards to recall out of all the next day�s strangeness was the sudden and complete recovery of her sense of security.

It was in the air when she woke in her low-ceilinged, dusky room; it went with her downstairs to the breakfast-table, flashed out at her from the fire, and reduplicated itself from the flanks of the urn and the sturdy flutings of the Georgian tea-pot. It was as if, in some roundabout way, all her diffused fears of the previous day, with their moment of sharp concentration about the newspaper article�as if this dim questioning of the future, and startled return upon the past, had between them liquidated the arrears of some haunting moral obligation. If she had indeed been careless of her husband�s affairs, it was, her new state seemed to prove, because her faith in him instinctively justified such carelessness; and his right to her faith had now affirmed itself in the very face of menace and suspicion. She had never seen him more untroubled, more naturally and unconsciously himself, than after the cross-examination to which she had subjected him: it was almost as if he had been aware of her doubts, and had wanted the air cleared as much as she did.

It was as clear, thank Heaven! as the bright outer light that surprised her almost with a touch of summer when she issued from the house for her daily round of the gardens. She had left Boyne at his desk, indulging herself, as she passed the library door, by a last peep at his quiet face, where he bent, pipe in mouth, above his papers; and now she had her own morning�s task to perform. The task involved, on such charmed winter days, almost as much happy loitering about the different quarters of her demesne as if spring were already at work there. There were such endless possibilities still before her, such opportunities to bring out the latent graces of the old place, without a single irreverent touch of alteration, that the winter was all too short to plan what spring and autumn executed. And her recovered sense of safety gave, on this particular morning, a peculiar zest to her progress through the sweet still place. She went first to the kitchen garden, where the espaliered pear trees drew complicated patterns on the walls, and pigeons were fluttering and preening about the silvery-slated roof of their cot. There was something wrong about the piping of the hot-house and she was expecting an authority from Dorchester, who was to drive out between trains and make a diagnosis of the boiler. But when she dipped into the damp heat of the greenhouses, among the spiced scents and waxy pinks and reds of old-fashioned exotics�even the flora of Lyng was in the note!�she learned that the great man had not arrived, and, the day being too rare to waste in an artificial atmosphere, she came out again and paced along the springy turf of the bowling-green to the gardens behind the house. At their farther end rose a grass terrace, looking across the fish-pond and yew hedges to the long house-front with its twisted chimney-stacks and blue roof angles all drenched in the pale gold moisture of the air.

Seen, thus, across the level tracery of the gardens, it sent her, from open windows and hospitably smoking chimneys, the look of some warm human presence, of a mind slowly ripened on a sunny wall of experience. She had never before had such a conviction that its secrets were all beneficent, kept, as they said to children, �for one�s good,� such a trust in its power to gather up her life and Ned�s into the harmonious pattern of the long long story it sat there weaving in the sun.

She heard steps behind her, and turned, expecting to see the gardener accompanied by the engineer from Dorchester. But only one figure was in sight, that of a youngish slightly built man, who, for reasons she could not on the spot have given, did not remotely resemble her notion of an authority on hot-house boilers. The newcomer, on seeing her, lifted his hat, and paused with the air of a gentleman�perhaps a traveller�who wishes to make it known that his intrusion is involuntary. Lyng occasionally attracted a more cultivated traveller, and Mary half expected to see the stranger dissemble a camera, or justify his presence by producing it. But he made no gesture of any sort, and after a moment she asked, in a tone responding to the courteous hesitation of his attitude: �Is there any one you wish to see?�

�I came to see Mr.�Boyne,� he answered. His intonation, rather than his accent, was faintly American, and Mary, at the note, looked at him more closely. The brim of his soft felt hat cast a shade on his face, which, thus obscured, wore to her short-sighted gaze a look of seriousness, as of a person arriving �on business,� and civilly but firmly aware of his rights.

Past experience had made her equally sensible to such claims; but she was jealous of her husband�s morning hours, and doubtful of his having given anyone the right to intrude on them.

�Have you an appointment with my husband?� she asked.

The visitor hesitated, as if unprepared for the question.

�I think he expects me,� he replied.

It was Mary�s turn to hesitate. �You see this is his time for work: he never sees anyone in the morning.�

He looked at her a moment without answering; then, as if accepting her decision, he began to move away. As he turned, Mary saw him pause and glance up at the peaceful house-front. Something in his air suggested weariness and disappointment, the dejection of the traveller who has come from far off and whose hours are limited by the time-table. It occurred to her that if this were the case her refusal might have made his errand vain, and a sense of compunction caused her to hasten after him.

�May I ask if you have come a long way?�

He gave her the same grave look. �Yes�I have come a long way.�

�Then, if you�ll go to the house, no doubt my husband will see you now. You�ll find him in the library.�

She did not know why she had added the last phrase, except from a vague impulse to atone for her previous inhospitality. The visitor seemed about to express his thanks, but her attention was distracted by the approach of the gardener with a companion who bore all the marks of being the expert from Dorchester.

�This way,� she said, waving the stranger to the house; and an instant later she had forgotten him in the absorption of her meeting with the boiler-maker.

The encounter led to such far-reaching results that the engineer ended by finding it expedient to ignore his train, and Mary was beguiled into spending the remainder of the morning in absorbed confabulation among the flower-pots. When the colloquy ended, she was surprised to find that it was nearly luncheon-time, and she half expected, as she hurried back to the house, to see her husband coming out to meet her. But she found no one in the court but an under-gardener raking the gravel, and the hall, when she entered it, was so silent that she guessed Boyne to be still at work.

Not wishing to disturb him, she turned into the drawing-room, and there, at her writing-table, lost herself in renewed calculations of the outlay to which the morning�s conference had pledged her. The fact that she could permit herself such follies had not yet lost its novelty; and somehow, in contrast to the vague fears of the previous days, it now seemed an element of her recovered security, of the sense that, as Ned had said, things in general had never been �righter.�

She was still luxuriating in a lavish play of figures when the parlour-maid, from the threshold, roused her with an enquiry as to the expediency of serving luncheon. It was one of their jokes that Trimmle announced luncheon as if she were divulging a state secret, and Mary, intent upon her papers, merely murmured an absent-minded assent.

She felt Trimmle wavering doubtfully on the threshold, as if in rebuke of such unconsidered assent; then her retreating steps sounded down the passage, and Mary, pushing away her papers, crossed the hall and went to the library door. It was still closed, and she wavered in her turn, disliking to disturb her husband, yet anxious that he should not exceed his usual measure of work. As she stood there, balancing her impulses, Trimmle returned with the announcement of luncheon, and Mary, thus impelled, opened the library door.

Boyne was not at his desk, and she peered about her, expecting to discover him before the book-shelves, somewhere down the length of the room; but her call brought no response, and gradually it become clear to her that he was not there.

She turned back to the parlour-maid.

�Mr.�Boyne must be upstairs. Please tell him that luncheon is ready.�

Trimmle appeared to hesitate between the obvious duty of obedience and an equally obvious conviction of the foolishness of the injunction laid on her. The struggle resulted in her saying: �If you please, Madam, Mr.�Boyne�s not upstairs.�

�Not in his room? Are you sure?�

�I�m sure, Madam.�

Mary consulted the clock. �Where is he, then?�

�He�s gone out,� Trimmle announced, with the superior air of one who has respectfully waited for the question that a well-ordered mind would have put first.

Mary�s conjecture had been right, then. Boyne must have gone to the gardens to meet her, and since she had missed him, it was clear that he had taken the shorter way by the south door, instead of going round the court. She crossed the hall to the french window opening directly on the yew garden, but the parlour-maid, after another moment of inner conflict, decided to bring out: �Please, Madam, Mr.�Boyne didn�t go that way.�

Mary turned back. �Where did he go? And when?�

�He went out of the front door, up the drive, Madam.� It was a matter of principle with Trimmle never to answer more than one question at a time.

�Up the drive? At this hour?� Mary went to the door herself, and glanced across the court through the tunnel of bare limes. But its perspective was as empty as when she had scanned it on entering.

�Did Mr.�Boyne leave no message?�

Trimmle seemed to surrender herself to a last struggle with the forces of chaos.

�No, Madam. He just went out with the gentleman.�

�The gentleman? What gentleman?� Mary wheeled about, as if to front this new factor.

�The gentleman who called, Madam,� said Trimmle resignedly.

�When did a gentleman call? Do explain yourself, Trimmle!�

Only the fact that Mary was very hungry, and that she wanted to consult her husband about the greenhouses, would have caused her to lay so unusual an injunction on her attendant; and even now she was detached enough to note in Trimmle�s eye the dawning defiance of the respectful subordinate who has been pressed too hard.

�I couldn�t exactly say the hour, Madam, because I didn�t let the gentleman in,� she replied, with an air of discreetly ignoring the irregularity of her mistress�s course.

�You didn�t let him in?�

�No, Madam. When the bell rang I was dressing, and Agnes���

�Go and ask Agnes, then,� said Mary.

Trimmle still wore her look of patient magnanimity. �Agnes would not know, Madam, for she had unfortunately burnt her hand in trimming the new lamp from town��Trimmle, as Mary was aware, had always been opposed to the new lamp��and so Mrs.�Dockett sent the kitchen-maid instead.�

Mary looked again at the clock. �It�s after two! Go and ask the kitchen-maid if Mr.�Boyne left any word.�

She went into luncheon without waiting, and Trimmle presently brought her there the kitchen-maid�s statement that the gentleman had called about eleven o�clock, and that Mr.�Boyne had gone out with him without leaving any message. The kitchen-maid did not even know the caller�s name, for he had written it on a slip of paper, which he had folded and handed to her, with the injunction to deliver it at once to Mr.�Boyne.

Mary finished her luncheon, still wondering, and when it was over, and Trimmle had brought the coffee to the drawing-room, her wonder had deepened to a first faint tinge of disquietude. It was unlike Boyne to absent himself without explanation at so unwonted an hour, and the difficulty of identifying the visitor whose summons he had apparently obeyed made his disappearance the more unaccountable. Mary Boyne�s experience as the wife of a busy engineer, subject to sudden calls and compelled to keep irregular hours, had trained her to the philosophic acceptance of surprises; but since Boyne�s withdrawal from business he had adopted a Benedictine regularity of life. As if to make up for the dispersed and agitated years, with their �stand-up� lunches, and dinners rattled down to the joltings of the dining-cars, he cultivated the last refinements of punctuality and monotony, discouraging his wife�s fancy for the unexpected, and declaring that to a delicate taste there were infinite gradations of pleasure in the recurrences of habit.

Still, since no life can completely defend itself from the unforeseen, it was evident that all Boyne�s precautions would sooner or later prove unavailable, and Mary concluded that he had cut short a tiresome visit by walking with his caller to the station, or at least accompanying him for part of the way.

This conclusion relieved her from further preoccupation, and she went out herself to take up her conference with the gardener. Thence she walked to the village post-office, a mile or so away; and when she turned toward home the early twilight was setting in.

She had taken a footpath across the downs, and as Boyne, meanwhile, had probably returned from the station by the high road, there was little likelihood of their meeting. She felt sure, however, of his having reached the house before her; so sure that, when she entered it herself, without even pausing to inquire of Trimmle, she made directly for the library. But the library was still empty, and with an unwonted exactness of visual memory she observed that the papers on her husband�s desk lay precisely as they had lain when she had gone in to call him to luncheon.

Then of a sudden she was seized by a vague dread of the unknown. She had closed the door behind her on entering, and as she stood alone in the long silent room, her dread seemed to take shape and sound, to be there breathing and lurking among the shadows. Her short-sighted eyes strained through them, half-discerning an actual presence, something aloof, that watched and knew; and in the recoil from that intangible presence she threw herself on the bell-rope and gave it a sharp pull.

The sharp summons brought Trimmle in precipitately with a lamp, and Mary breathed again at this sobering reappearance of the usual.

�You may bring tea if Mr.�Boyne is in,� she said, to justify her ring.

�Very well, Madam. But Mr.�Boyne is not in,� said Trimmle, putting down the lamp.

�Not in? You mean he�s come back and gone out again?�

�No, Madam. He�s never been back.�

The dread stirred again, and Mary knew that now it had her fast.

�Not since he went out with�the gentleman?�

�Not since he went out with the gentleman.�

�But who was the gentleman?� Mary insisted, with the shrill note of someone trying to be heard through a confusion of noises.

�That I couldn�t say, Madam.� Trimmle, standing there by the lamp, seemed suddenly to grow less round and rosy, as though eclipsed by the same creeping shade of apprehension.

�But the kitchen-maid knows�wasn�t it the kitchen-maid who let him in?�

�She doesn�t know either, Madam, for he wrote his name on a folded paper.�

Mary, through her agitation, was aware that they were both designating the unknown visitor by a vague pronoun, instead of the conventional formula which, till then, had kept their allusions within the bounds of conformity. And at the same moment her mind caught at the suggestion of the folded paper.

�But he must have a name! Where�s the paper?�

She moved to the desk, and began to turn over the documents that littered it. The first that caught her eye was an unfinished letter in her husband�s hand, with his pen lying across it, as though dropped there at a sudden summons.

�My dear Parvis��who was Parvis?��I have just received your letter announcing Ellwell�s death, and while I suppose there is now no further risk of trouble, it might be safer���

She tossed the sheet aside, and continued her search; but no folded paper was discoverable among the letters arid pages of manuscript which had been swept together in a heap, as if by a hurried or a startled gesture.

�But the kitchen-maid saw him. Send her here,� she commanded, wondering at her dullness in not thinking sooner of so simple a solution.

Trimmle vanished in a flash, as if thankful to be out of the room, and when she reappeared, conducting the agitated underling, Mary had regained her self-possession, and had her questions ready.

The gentleman was a stranger, yes�that she understood. But what had he said? And, above all, what had he looked like? The first question was easily enough answered, for the disconcerting reason that he had said so little�had merely asked for Mr.�Boyne, and scribbling something on a bit of paper, had requested that it should be at once carried in to him.

�Then you don�t know what he wrote? You�re not sure it was his name?�

The kitchen-maid was not sure, but supposed it was, since he had written it in answer to her inquiry as to whom she should announce.

�And when you carried the paper in to Mr.�Boyne, what did he say?�

The kitchen-maid did not think that Mr.�Boyne had said anything, but she could not be sure, for just as she had handed him the paper and he was opening it, she had become aware that the visitor had followed her into the library, and she had slipped out, leaving the two gentlemen together.

�But then, if you left them in the library, how do you know that they went out of the house?�

This question plunged the witness into a momentary inarticulateness, from which she was rescued by Trimmle, who, by means of ingenious circumlocutions, elicited the statement that before she could cross the hall to the back passage she had heard the two gentlemen behind her, and had seen them go out of the front door together.

�Then, if you saw the strange gentleman twice, you must be able to tell me what he looked like.�

But with this final challenge to her powers of expression it became clear that the limit of the kitchen-maid�s endurance had been reached. The obligation of going to the front door to �show in� a visitor was in itself so subversive of the fundamental order of things that it had thrown her faculties into hopeless disarray, and she could only stammer out, after various panting efforts: �His hat, mum, was different-like, as you might say���

�Different? How different?� Mary flashed out, her own mind, in the same instant, leaping back to an image left on it that morning, and then lost under layers of subsequent impressions.

�His hat had a wide brim, you mean? And his face was pale�a youngish face?� Mary pressed her, with a white-lipped intensity of interrogation. But if the kitchen-maid found any adequate answer to this challenge, it was swept away for her listener down the rushing current of her own convictions. The stranger in the garden! Why had Mary not thought of him before? She needed no one now to tell her that it was he who had called for her husband and gone away with him. But who was he, and why had Boyne obeyed him?

It leaped out at her suddenly, like a grin out of the dark, that they had often called England so little��such a confoundedly hard place to get lost in.�

A confoundedly hard place to get lost in! That had been her husband�s phrase. And now, with the whole machinery of official investigation sweeping its flashlights from shore to shore, and across the dividing straits; now, with Boyne�s name blazing from the walls of every town and village, his portrait (how that wrung her!) hawked up and down the country like the image of a hunted criminal; now the little compact populous island, so policed, surveyed and administered, revealed itself as a Sphinx-like guardian of abysmal mysteries, staring back into his wife�s anguished eyes as if with the wicked joy of knowing something they would never know!

In the fortnight since Boyne�s disappearance there had been no word of him, no trace of his movements. Even the usual misleading reports that raise expectancy in tortured bosoms had been few and fleeting. No one but the kitchen-maid had seen Boyne leave the house, and no one else had seen �the gentleman� who accompanied him. All inquiries in the neighbourhood failed to elicit the memory of a stranger�s presence that day in the neighbourhood of Lyng. And no one had met Edward Boyne, either alone or in company, in any of the neighbouring villages, or on the road across the downs, or at either of the local railway stations. The sunny English noon had swallowed him as completely as if he had gone out into Cimmerian night.

Mary, while every official means of investigation was working at its highest pressure, had ransacked her husband�s papers for any trace of antecedent complications, of entanglements or obligations unknown to her, that might throw a ray into the darkness. But if any such had existed in the background of Boyne�s life, they had vanished like the slip of paper on which the visitor had written his name. There remained no possible thread of guidance except�if it were indeed an exception�the letter which Boyne had apparently been in the act of writing when he received his mysterious summons. That letter, read and re-read by his wife, and submitted by her to the police, yielded little enough to feed conjecture.

�I have just heard of Elwell�s death, and while I suppose there is now no further risk of trouble, it might be safer��� That was all. The �risk of trouble� was easily explained by the newspaper clipping which had apprised Mary of the suit brought against her husband by one of his associates in the Blue Star enterprise. The only new information conveyed by the letter was the fact of its showing Boyne, when he wrote it, to be still apprehensive of the results of the suit, though he had told his wife that it had been withdrawn, and though the letter itself proved that the plaintiff was dead. It took several days of cabling to fix the identity of the �Parvis� to whom the fragment was addressed, but even after these inquiries had shown him to be a Waukesha lawyer, no new facts concerning the Elwell suit were elicited. He appeared to have had no direct concern in it, but to have been conversant with the facts merely as an acquaintance, and possible intermediary; and he declared himself unable to guess with what object Boyne intended to seek his assistance.

This negative information, sole fruit of the first fortnight�s search, was not increased by a jot during the slow weeks that followed. Mary knew that the investigations were still being carried on, but she had a vague sense of their gradually slackening, as the actual march of time seemed to slacken. It was as though the days, flying horror-struck from the shrouded image of the one inscrutable day, gained assurance as the distance lengthened, till at last they fell back into their normal gait. And so with the human imaginations at work on the dark event. No doubt it occupied them still, but week by week and hour by hour it grew less absorbing, took up less space, was slowly but inevitably crowded out of the foreground of consciousness by the new problems perpetually bubbling up from the cloudy cauldron of human experience.

Even Mary Boyne�s consciousness gradually felt the same lowering of velocity. It still swayed with the incessant oscillations of conjecture; but they were slower, more rhythmical in their beat. There were even moments of weariness when, like the victim of some poison, she saw herself domesticated with the Horror, accepting its perpetual presence as one of the fixed conditions of life.

These moments lengthened into hours and days, till she passed into a phase of stolid acquiescence. She watched the routine of daily life with the incurious eye of a savage on whom the meaningless processes of civilisation make but the faintest impression. She had come to regard herself as part of the routine, a spoke of the wheel, revolving with its motion; she felt almost like the furniture of the room in which she sat, an insensate object to be dusted and pushed about with the chairs and tables. And this deepening apathy held her fast at Lyng, in spite of the entreaties of friends and the usual medical recommendation of �change.� Her friends supposed that her refusal to move was inspired by the belief that her husband would one day return to the spot from which he had vanished, and a beautiful legend grew up about this imaginary state of waiting. But in reality she had no such belief: the depths of anguish enclosing her were no longer lighted by flashes of hope. She was sure that Boyne would never come back, that he had gone out of her sight as completely as if Death itself had waited that day on the threshhold. She had even renounced, one by one, the various theories as to his disappearance which had been advanced by the Press, the police, and her own agonised imagination. In sheer lassitude her mind turned from these alternatives of horror, and sank back into the blank fact that he was gone.

No, she would never know what had become of him�no one would ever know. But the house knew; the library in which she spent her long lonely evenings knew. For it was here that the last scene had been enacted, here that the stranger had come, and spoken the word which had caused Boyne to rise and follow him. The floor she trod had felt his tread; the books on the shelves had seen his face; and there were moments when the intense consciousness of the old dusky walls seemed about to break out into some audible revelation of their secret. But the revelation never came, and she knew it would never come. Lyng was not one of the garrulous old houses that betray the secrets entrusted to them. Its very legend proved that it had always been the mute accomplice, the incorruptible custodian of the mysteries it had surprised. And Mary Boyne, sitting face to face with its silence, felt the futility of seeking to break it by any human means.

�I don�t say it wasn�t straight, and yet I don�t say it was straight. It was business.�

Mary, at the words, lifted her head with a start, and looked intently at the speaker.

When, half an hour before, a card with �Mr.�Parvis� on it had been brought up to her, she had been immediately aware that the name had been a part of her consciousness ever since she had read it at the head of Boyne�s unfinished letter. In the library she had found awaiting her a small sallow man with a bald head and gold eye-glasses, and it sent a tremor through her to know that this was the person to whom her husband�s last known thought had been directed.

Parvis, civilly, but without vain preamble�in the manner of a man who has his watch in his hand�had set forth the object of his visit. He had �run over� to England on business, and finding himself in the neighbourhood of Dorchester, had not wished to leave it without paying his respects to Mrs.�Boyne; and without asking her, if the occasion offered, what she meant to do about Bob Elwell�s family.

The words touched the spring of some obscure dread in Mary�s bosom. Did her visitor, after all, know what Boyne had meant by his unfinished phrase? She asked for an elucidation of his question, and noticed at once that he seemed surprised at her continued ignorance of the subject. Was it possible that she really knew as little as she said?

�I know nothing�you must tell me,� she faltered out; and her visitor thereupon proceeded to unfold his story. It threw, even to her confused perceptions, and imperfectly initiated vision, a lurid glare on the whole hazy episode of the Blue Star Mine. Her husband had made his money in that brilliant speculation at the cost of �getting ahead� of someone less alert to seize the chance; and the victim of his ingenuity was young Robert Elwell, who had �put him on� to the Blue Star scheme.

Parvis, at Mary�s first cry, had thrown her a sobering glance through his impartial glasses.

�Bob Elwell wasn�t smart enough, that�s all; if he had been, he might have turned round and served Boyne the same way. It�s the kind of thing that happens every day in business. I guess it�s what the scientists call the survival of the fittest�see?� said Mr.�Parvis, evidently pleased with the aptness of his analogy.

Mary felt a physical shrinking from the next question she tried to frame: it was as though the words on her lips had a taste that nauseated her.

�But then�you accuse my husband of doing something dishonourable?�

Mr.�Parvis surveyed the question dispassionately. �Oh no, I don�t. I don�t even say it wasn�t straight.� He glanced up and down the long line of books, as if one of them might have supplied him with the definition he sought. �I don�t say it wasn�t straight, and yet I don�t say it was straight. It was business.� After all, no definition in his category could be more comprehensive than that.

Mary sat staring at him with a look of terror. He seemed to her like the indifferent emissary of some evil power.

�But Mr.�Elwell�s lawyers apparently did not take your view, since I suppose the suit was withdrawn by their advice.�

�Oh, yes; they knew he hadn�t a leg to stand on, technically. It was when they advised him to withdraw the suit that he got desperate. You see, he�d borrowed most of the money he lost in the Blue Star, and he was up a tree. That�s why he shot himself when they told him he had no show.�

The horror was sweeping over Mary in great deafening waves.

�He shot himself? He killed himself because of that?�

�Well, he didn�t kill himself, exactly. He dragged on two months before he died.� Parvis emitted the statement as unemotionally as a gramophone grinding out its �record.�

�You mean that he tried to kill himself, and failed? And tried again?�

�Oh, he didn�t have to try again,� said Parvis grimly.

They sat opposite each other in silence, he swinging his eye-glasses thoughtfully about his finger, she, motionless, her arms stretched along her knees in an attitude of rigid tension.

�But if you knew all this,� she began at length, hardly able to force her voice above a whisper, �how is it that when I wrote to you at the time of my husband�s disappearance you said you didn�t understand his letter?�

Parvis received this without perceptible embarrassment: �Why, I didn�t understand it�strictly speaking. And it wasn�t the time to talk about it, if I had. The Elwell business was settled when the suit was withdrawn. Nothing I could have told you would have helped you to find your husband.�

Mary continued to scrutinise him. �Then why are you telling me now?�

Still Parvis did not hesitate. �Well, to begin with, I supposed you knew more than you appear to�I mean about the circumstances of Elwell�s death. And then people are talking of it now; the whole matter�s been raked up again. And I thought if you didn�t know you ought to.�

She remained silent, and he continued: �You see, it�s only come out lately what a bad state Elwell�s affairs were in. His wife�s a proud woman, and she fought on as long as she could, going out to work, and taking sewing at home when she got too sick�something with the heart, I believe. But she had his mother to look after, and the children, and she broke down under it, and finally had to ask for help. That called attention to the case, and the papers took it up, and a subscription was started. Everybody out there liked Bob Elwell, and most of the prominent names in the place are down on the list, and people began to wonder why���

Parvis broke off to fumble in an inner pocket. �Here,� he continued, �here�s an account of the whole thing from the Sentinel�a little sensational, of course. But I guess you�d better look it over.�

He held out a newspaper to Mary, who unfolded it slowly, remembering, as she did so, the evening when, in that same room, the perusal of a clipping from the Sentinel had first shaken the depths of her security.

As she opened the paper, her eyes, shrinking from the glaring headlines, �Widow of Boyne�s Victim Forced to Appeal for Aid,� ran down the column of text to two portraits inserted in it. The first was her husband�s, taken from a photograph made the year they had come to England. It was the picture of him that she liked best, the one that stood on the writing-table upstairs in her bedroom. As the eyes in the photograph met hers, she felt it would be impossible to read what was said of him, and closed her lids with the sharpness of the pain.

�I thought if you felt disposed to put your name down��� she heard Parvis continue.

She opened her eyes with an effort, and they fell on the other portrait. It was that of a youngish man, slightly built, with features somewhat blurred by the shadow of a projecting hat-brim. Where had she seen that outline before? She stared at it confusedly, her heart hammering in her ears. Then she gave a cry.

�This is the man�the man who came for my husband!�

She heard Parvis start to his feet, and was dimly aware that she had slipped backward into the corner of the sofa, and that he was bending above her in alarm. She straightened herself, and reached out for the paper, which she had dropped.

�It�s the man! I should know him anywhere!� she persisted in a voice that sounded to her own ears like a scream.

Parvis�s answer seemed to come to her from far off, down endless fog-muffled windings.

�Mrs.�Boyne, you�re not very well. Shall I call somebody? Shall I get a glass of water?�

�No, no, no!� She threw herself toward him, her hand frantically clutching the newspaper. �I tell you, it�s the man! I know him! He spoke to me in the garden!�

Parvis took the journal from her, directing his glasses to the portrait. �It can�t be, Mrs.�Boyne. It�s Robert Elwell.�

�Robert Elwell?� Her white stare seemed to travel into space. �Then it was Robert Elwell who came for him.�

�Came for Boyne? The day he went away from here.� Parvis�s voice dropped as hers rose. He bent over, laying a fraternal hand on her, as if to coax her gently back into her seat. �Why, Elwell was dead! Don�t you remember?�

Mary sat with her eyes fixed on the picture, unconscious of what he was saying.

�Don�t you remember Boyne�s unfinished letter to me�the one you found on his desk that day? It was written just after he�d heard of Elwell�s death.� She noticed an odd shake in Parvis�s unemotional voice. �Surely you remember!� he urged her.

Yes, she remembered: that was the profoundest horror of it. Elwell had died the day before her husband�s disappearance; and this was Elwell�s portrait; and it was the portrait of the man who had spoken to her in the garden. She lifted her head and looked slowly about the library. The library could have borne witness that it was also the portrait of the man who had come in that day to call Boyne from his unfinished letter. Through the misty surgings of her brain she heard the faint boom of half-forgotten words�words spoken by Alida Stair on the lawn at Pangbourne before Boyne and his wife had ever seen the house at Lyng, or had imagined that they might one day live there.

�This was the man who spoke to me,� she repeated.

She looked again at Parvis. He was trying to conceal his disturbance under what he probably imagined to be an expression of indulgent commiseration; but the edges of his lips were blue. �He thinks me mad; but I�m not mad,� she reflected and suddenly there flashed upon her a way of justifying her strange affirmation.

She sat quiet, controlling the quiver of her lips, and waiting till she could trust her voice; then she said, looking straight at Parvis: �Will you answer me one question, please? When was it that Robert Elwell tried to kill himself?�

�When�when?� Parvis stammered.

�Yes; the date. Please try to remember.�

She saw that he was growing still more afraid of her. �I have a reason,� she insisted.

�Yes, yes. Only I can�t remember. About two months before, I should say.�

�I want the date,� she repeated.

Parvis picked up the newspaper. �We might see here,� he said, still humouring her. He ran his eyes down the page. �Here it is. Last October�the���

She caught the words from him. �The 20th, wasn�t it?� With a sharp look at her, he verified. �Yes, the 20th. Then you did know?�

�I know now.� Her gaze continued to travel past him. �Sunday, the 20th�that was the day he came first.�

Parvis�s voice was almost inaudible. �Came here first?�

�Yes.�

�You saw him twice, then?�

�Yes, twice.� She just breathed it at him. �He came first on the 20th October. I remember the date because it was the day we went up Meldon Steep for the first time.� She felt a faint gasp of inward laughter at the thought that but for that she might have forgotten.

Parvis continued to scrutinise her, as if trying to intercept her gaze.

�We saw him from the roof,� she went on. �He came down the lime avenue toward the house. He was dressed just as he is in the picture. My husband saw him first. He was frightened, and ran down ahead of me; but there was no one there. He had vanished.�

�Elwell had vanished?� Parvis faltered.

�Yes.� Their two whispers seemed to grope for each other. �I couldn�t think what had happened. I see now. He tried to come then; but he wasn�t dead enough�he couldn�t reach us. He had to wait for two months to die; and then he came back again�and Ned went with him.�

She nodded at Parvis with the look of triumph of a child who has worked out a difficult puzzle. But suddenly she lifted her hands with a desperate gesture, pressing them to her temples.

�Oh, my God! I sent him to Ned�I told him where to go! I sent him to this room!� she screamed.

She felt the walls of books rush toward her, like inward falling ruins; and she heard Parvis, a long way off, through the ruins, crying to her, and struggling to get at her. But she was numb to his touch, she did not know what he was saying. Through the tumult she heard but one clear note, the voice of Alida Stair, speaking on the lawn at Pangbourne.

�You won�t know till afterward,� it said. �You won�t know till long, long afterward.�