The nervous fingers wavered, clutched at a small carnelian cross that hung from her neck, then fell despairingly.

“Give me my child, mother, and then I will be quiet!”

“Hush! hush! thou fool-some one might be near! See-there is thy father coming, even now! Get in quickly!”

She raised her eyes to her mother’s face, weary eyes that yet had a flickering, uncertain blaze in their shaded depths.

“Art thou a mother and hast no pity on me, a mother? Give me my child!”

Her voice rose in a strange, low cry, broken by her father’s hand upon her mouth.

“Shameless!” said he, with set teeth. “Get to thy chamber, and be not seen again to-night, or I will have thee bound!”

She went at that, and a hard-faced serving woman followed, and presently returned, bringing a key to her mistress.

“Is all well with her-and the child also?”

“She is quiet, Mistress Dwining, well for the night, be sure. The child fretteth endlessly, but save for that it thriveth with me.”

The parents were left alone together on the high square porch with its great pillars, and the rising moon began to make faint shadows of the young vinc leaves that shot up luxuriantly around them: moving shadows, like lit-tie stretching fingers, on the broad and heavy planks of the oaken floor.

“It groweth well, this vine thou broughtest me in the ship, my husband.”

“Aye,” he broke in bitterly, “and so doth the shame I brought thee! Had I known of it I would sooner have had the ship founder beneath us, and have seen our child cleanly drowned, than live to this end!”

“Thou art very hard, Samuel, art thou not afeard for her life? She grieveth sore for the child, aye, and for the green fields to walk in!”

“Nay,” said he grimly, “I fear not. She hath lost already what is more than life; and she shall have air enough soon. To-morrow the ship is ready, and we return to England. None knoweth of our stain here, not one, and if the town hath a child unaccounted for to rear in decent ways–why, it is not the first, even here. It will be well enough cared for! And truly we have matter for thankfulness, that her cousin is yet willing to marry her.”

“Has thou told him?”

“Aye! Thinkest thou I would cast shame into another man’s house, unknowing it? He hath always desired her, but she would none of him, the stubborn! She hath small choice now!”

“Will he be kind, Samuel? can he-“

“Kind? What call’st thou it to take such as she to wife? Kind! How many men would take her, an’ she had double the fortune? and being of the family already, he is glad to hide the blot forever.”

“An’ if she would not? He is but a coarse fellow, and she ever shunned him.” “Art thou mad, woman? She weddeth him ere we? sail to-morrow, or she stayeth ever in that chamber. The girl is not so sheer a fool! He maketh an honest woman of her, and saveth our house from open shame. What other hope for her than a new life to cover the old? Let her have an honest child, an’ she so longeth for one!”

He strode heavily across the porch, till the loose planks creaked again, strode back and forth, with his arms folded and his brows fiercely knit above his iron mouth.

Overhead the shadows flickered mockingly across a white face amoung the leaves, with eyes of wasted fire.

“O, George, what a house! what a lovely house! I am sure it’s haunted! Let us get that house to live in this summer! We will have Kate and Jack and Susy and Jim of course, and a splendid time of it!”

Young husbands are indulgent, but still they have to recognize facts.

“My dear, the house may not be to rent: and it may also not be habitable.”

“There is surely somebody in it. I am going to inquire!”

The great central gate was rusted off its hinges, and the long drive had trees in it, but a little footpath showed signs of steady usage, and up that Mrs. Jenny went, followed by her obedient George. The front windows of the old mansion were blank, but in a wing at the back they found white curtains and open doors. Outside, in the clear May sunshine, a woman was washing. She was polite and friendly, and evidently glad of visitors in that lonely place. She “guessed it could be rented-didn’t know.” The heirs were in Europe, but “there was a lawyer in New York had the lettin’ of it.”

There had been folks there years ago, but not in her time. She and her husband had the rent of their part for taking care of the place. “Not that they took much care on’t either, but keepin’ robbers out.” It was furnished throughout, old-fashioned enough, but good; and “if they took it she could do the work for ’em herself, she guessed-if he was willin’!”

Never was a crazy scheme more easily arranged. George knew that lawyer in New York; the rent was not alarming; and the nearness to a rising sea-shore resort made it a still pleasanter place to spend the summer.

Kate and Jack and Susy and Jim cheerfully accepted, and the June moon found them all sitting on the high front porch.

They had explored the house from top to bottom, from the great room in the garret, with nothing in it but a rickety cradle, to the well in the cellar without a curb and with a rusty chain going down to unknown blackness below. They had explored the grounds, once beautiful with rare trees and shrubs, but now a gloomy wilderness of tangled shade.

The old lilacs and laburnums, the spirea and syringa, nodded against the second-story windows. What garden plants survived were great ragged bushes or great shapeless beds. A huge wistaria vine covered the whole front of the house. The trunk, it was too large to call a stem, rose at the corner of the porch by the high steps, and had once climbed its pillars; but now the pillars were wrenched from their places and held rigid and helpless by the tightly wound and knotted arms.

It fenced in all the upper story of the porch with a knitted wall of stem and leaf; it ran along the eaves, holding up the gutter that had once supported it; it shaded every window with heavy green; and the drooping, fragrant blossoms made a waving sheet of purple from roof to ground…”Did you ever see such a wistaria!” cried ecstatic Mrs. Jenny. “It is worth the rent just to sit under such a vine,-a fig tree beside it would be sheer superfluity and wicked extravagance!”

“Jenny makes much of her wistaria,” said George, “because she’s so disappointed about the ghosts. She made up her mind at first sight to have ghosts in the house, and she can’t find even a ghost story!”

“No,” Jenny assented mournfully; “I pumped poor Mrs. Pepperill for three days, but could get nothing out of her. But I’m convinced there is a story, if we could only find it. You need not tell me that a house like this, with a garden like this, and a cellar like this, isn’t haunted!”

“I agree with you,” said Jack. Jack was a reporter on a New York daily, and engaged to Mrs. Jenny’s pretty sister. “And if we don’t find a real ghost, you may be very sure I shall make one. It’s too good an opportunity to lose!”

The pretty sister, who sat next him, resented. “You shan’t do anything of the sort, Jack! This is a real ghostly place, and I won’t have you make fun of it! Look at that group of trees out there in the long grass-it looks for all the world like a crouching, hunted figure!”

“It looks to me like a woman picking huckleberries,” said Jim, who was married to George’s pretty sister.

“Be still, Jim!” said that fair young woman. “I believe in Jenny’s ghost as much as she does. Such a place! Just look at this great wistaria trunk crawling up by the steps here! It looks for all the world like a writhing body-cringing-beseeching!”

“Yes,” answered the subdued Jim, “it does, Susy. See its waist,-about two yards of it, and twisted at that! A waste of good material!”

“Don’t be so horrid, boys! Go off and smoke somewhere if you can’t be congenial!”

“We can! We will! We’ll be as ghostly as you please:’ And forthwith they began to see bloodstains and crouching figures so plentifully that the most delightful shivers multiplied, and the fair enthusiasts started for bed, declaring they should never sleep a wink.

“We shall all surely dream,” cried Mrs. Jenny, “and we must all tell our dreams in the morning!”

“There’s another thing certain,” said George, catching Susy as she tripped over a loose plank; “and that is that you frisky creatures must use the side door till I get this Eiffel tower of a portico fixed, or we shall have some fresh ghosts on our hands! We found a plank here that yawns like a trap-door-big enough to swallow you,-and I believe the bottom of the thing is in China!”

The next morning found them all alive, and eating a substantial New England breakfast, to the accompaniment of saws and hammers on the porch, where carpenters of quite miraculous promptness were tearing things to pieces generally.

“It’s got to come down mostly,” they had said. “These timbers are clean rotted through, what ain’t pulled out o’ line by this great creeper. That’s about all that holds the thing up.”

There was clear reason in what they said, and with a caution from anxious Mrs. Jenny not to hurt the wistaria, they were left to demolish and repair at leisure.

“How about ghosts?” asked Jack after a fourth griddle cake. “I had one, and it’s taken away my appetite!”

Mrs. Jenny gave a little shriek and dropped her knife and fork.

“Oh, so had I! I had the most awful-well, not dream exactly, but feeling. I had forgotten all about it!”

“Must have been awful,” said Jack, taking another cake. “Do tell us about the feeling. My ghost will wait.” “It makes me creep to think of it even now,” she said. “I woke up, all at once, with that dreadful feeling as if something were going to happen, you know! I was wide awake, and hearing every little sound for miles around, it seemed to me. There are so many strange little noises in the country for all it is so still. Millions of crickets and things outside, and all kinds of rustles in the trees! There wasn’t much wind, and the moonlight came through in my three great windows in three white squares on the black old floor, and those fingery wistaria leaves we were talking of last night just seemed to crawl all over them. And-O, girls, you know that dreadful well in the cellar?”

A most gratifying impression was made by this, and Jenny proceeded cheerfully:

“Well, while it was so horridly still, and I lay there trying not to wake George, I heard as plainly as if it were right in the room, that old chain down there rattle and creak over the stones!”

“Bravo!” cried Jack. “That’s fine! I’ll put it in the Sunday edition!”

“Be still!” said Kate. “What was it, Jenny? Did you really see anything?”

“No, I didn’t, I’m sorry to say. But just then I didn’t want to. I woke George, and made such a fuss that he gave me bromide, and said he’d go and look, and that’s the last I thought of it till Jack reminded me-the bromide worked so well.”

“Now, Jack, give us yours,” said Jim. “Maybe, it will dovetail in somehow. Thirsty ghost, I imagine; maybe they had prohibition here even then!”

Jack folded his napkin, and leaned back in his most impressive manner.

“It was striking twelve by the great hall clock-” he began.

“There isn’t any hall clock!”

“O hush, Jim, you spoil the current! It was just one o’clock then, by my old-fashioned repeater.

“Waterbury! Never mind what time it was!”

“Well, honestly, I woke up sharp, like our beloved hostess, and tried to go to sleep again, but couldn’t. I experienced all those moonlight and grasshopper sensations, just like Jenny, and was wondering what could have been the matter with the supper, when in came my ghost, and I knew it was all a dream! It was a female ghost, and I imagine she was young and handsome, but all those crouching, hunted figures of last evening ran riot in my brain, and this poor creature looked just like them. She was all wrapped up in a shawl, and had a big bundle under her arm,-dear me, I am spoiling the story! With the air and gait of one in frantic haste and terror, the muffled figure glided to a dark old bureau, and seemed taking things from the drawers. As she turned, the moonlight shone full on a little red cross that hung from her neck by a thin gold chain-I saw it glitter as she crept noiselessly’ from the room! That’s all.”

“O Jack, don’t be so horrid! Did you really? Is that all! What do you think it was?”

“I am not horrid by nature, only professionally. I really did. That was all. And I am fully convinced it was the genuine, legitimate ghost of an eloping chambermaid with kleptomania!”

“You are too bad, Jack!” cried Jenny. “You take all the horror out of it. There isn’t a ‘creep’ left among us.”

“It’s no time for creeps at nine-thirty A.M., with sunlight and carpenters outside! However, if you can’t wait till twilight for your creeps, I think I can furnish one or two,” said George. “I went down cellar after Jenny’s ghost!”

There was a delighted chorus of female voices, and Jenny cast upon her lord a glance of genuine gratitude.

“It’s all very well to lie in bed and see ghosts, or hear them,” he went on. “But the young householder suspecteth burglars, even though as a medical man he knoweth nerves, and after Jenny dropped off I started on a voyage of discovery. I never will again, I promise you!” “Why, what was it?”

“Oh, George!”

“I got a candle-“

“Good mark for the burglars,” murmured Jack.

“And went all over the house, gradually working down to the cellar and the well.”

“Well?” said Jack.

“Now you can laugh; but that cellar is no joke by daylight, and a candle there at night is about as inspiring as a lightning-bug in the Mammoth Cave. I went along with the light, trying not to fall into the well prematurely; got to it all at once; held the light down and then I saw, right under my feet-(I nearly fell over her, or walked through her, perhaps),-a woman, hunched up under a shawl! She had hold of the chain, and the candle shone on her hands-white, thin hands-on a little red cross that hung from her neck-ride Jack! I’m no believer in ghosts, and I firmly object to unknown parties in the house at night; so I spoke to her rather fiercely. She didn’t seem to notice that, and I reached down to take hold of her-then I came upstairs!”

“What for?”

“What happened?”

“What was the matter?”

“Well, nothing happened. Only she wasn’t there! May have been indigestion, of course, but as a physician I don’t advise any one to court indigestion alone at midnight in a cellar!”

“This is the most interesting and peripatetic and evasive ghost I ever heard of!” said Jack. “It’s my belief she has no end of silver tankards, and jewels galore, at the bottom of that well, and I move we go and see!”

“To the bottom of the well, Jack?”

“To the bottom of the mystery. Come on!”

There was unanimous assent, and the fresh cambrics and pretty boots were gallantly escorted below by gentlemen whose jokes were so frequent that many of them were a little forced.

The deep old cellar was so dark that they had to bring lights, and the well so gloomy in its blackness that the ladies recoiled.

“That well is enough to scare even a ghost. It’s my opinion you’d better let well enough alone?” quoth Jim.

“Truth lies hid in a well, and we must get her out,” said George. “Bear a hand with the chain?”

Jim pulled away on the chain, George turned the creaking windlass, and Jack was chorus.

“A wet sheet for this ghost, if not a flowing sea,” said he. “Seems to be hard work raising spirits! I suppose he kicked the bucket when he went down!”

As the chain lightened and shortened there grew a strained silence among them; and when at length the bucket appeared, rising slowly through the dark water, there was an eager, half reluctant peering, and a natural drawing back. They poked the gloomy contents. “Only water.”

“Nothing but mud.”

“Something-“

They emptied the bucket up on the dark earth, and then the girls all went out into the air, into the bright warm sunshine in front of the house, where was the sound of saw and hammer, and the smell of new wood. There was nothing said until the men joined them, and then Jenny timidly asked:

“How old should you think it was, George?”

“All of a century,” he answered. “That water is a preservative-lime in it. Oh!-you mean?–Not more than a month: a very little baby!”.There was another silence at this, broken by a cry from the workmen. They had removed the floor and the side walls of the old porch, so that the sunshine poured down to the dark stones of the cellar bottom. And there, in the strangling grasp of the roots of the great wistaria, lay the bones of a woman, from whose neck still hung a tiny scarlet cross on a thin chain of gold.

PHENISTONE ROAD, CLAPHAM.

August 20th, 190–.

I have had what I believe to be the most remarkable day in my life, and while the events are still fresh in my mind, I wish to put them down on paper as clearly as possible.

Let me say at the outset that my name is James Clarence Withencroft.

I am forty years old, in perfect health, never having known a day’s illness.

By profession I am an artist, not a very successful one, but I earn enough money by my black-and–white work to satisfy my necessary wants.

My only near relative, a sister, died five years ago, so that I am independent. I breakfasted this morning at nine, and after glancing through the morning paper I lighted my pipe and proceeded to let my mind wander in the hope that I might chance upon some subject for my pencil.

The room, though door and windows were open, was oppressively hot, and I had just made up my mind that the coolest and most comfortable place in the neighbourhood would be the deep end of the public swimming bath, when the idea came.

I began to draw. So intent was I on my work that I left my lunch untouched, only stopping work when the clock of St. Jude’s struck four.

The final result, for a hurried sketch, was, I felt sure, the best thing I had done. It showed a criminal in the dock immediately after the judge had pronounced sentence. The man was fat—enormously fat. The flesh hung in rolls about his chin; it creased his huge, stumpy neck. He was clean shaven (perhaps I should say a few days before he must have been clean shaven) and almost bald. He stood in the dock, his short, clumsy fingers clasping the rail, looking straight in front of him. The feeling that his expression conveyed was not so much one of horror as of utter, absolute collapse.

There seemed nothing in the man strong enough to sustain that mountain of flesh.

I rolled up the sketch, and without quite knowing why, placed it in my pocket. Then with the rare sense of happiness which the knowledge of a good thing well done gives, I left the house.

I believe that I set out with the idea of calling upon Trenton, for I remember walking along Lytton Street and turning to the right along Gilchrist Road at the bottom of the hill where the men were at work on the new tram lines.

From there onwards I have only the vaguest recollection of where I went. The one thing of which I was fully conscious was the awful heat, that came up from the dusty asphalt pavement as an almost palpable wave. I longed for the thunder promised by the great banks of copper-coloured cloud that hung low over the western sky.

I must have walked five or six miles, when a small boy roused me from my reverie by asking the time.

It was twenty minutes to seven.

When he left me I began to take stock of my bearings. I found myself standing before a gate that led into a yard bordered by a strip of thirsty earth, where there were flowers, purple stock and scarlet geranium. Above the entrance was a board with the inscription–

CHS. ATKINSON. MONUMENTAL MASON.

WORKER IN ENGLISH AND ITALIAN MARBLES

From the yard itself came a cheery whistle, the noise of hammer blows, and the cold sound of steel meeting stone.

A sudden impulse made me enter.

A man was sitting with his back towards me, busy at work on a slab of curiously veined marble. He turned round as he heard my steps and I stopped short.

It was the man I had been drawing, whose portrait lay in my pocket.

He sat there, huge and elephantine, the sweat pouring from his scalp, which he wiped with a red silk handkerchief. But though the face was the same, the expression was absolutely different.

He greeted me smiling, as if we were old friends, and shook my hand.

I apologised for my intrusion.

“Everything is hot and glary outside,” I said. “This seems an oasis in the wilderness.”

“I don’t know about the oasis,” he replied, “but it certainly is hot, as hot as hell. Take a seat, sir!”

He pointed to the end of the gravestone on which he was at work, and I sat down.

“That’s a beautiful piece of stone you’ve got hold of,” I said.

He shook his head. “In a way it is,” he answered; “the surface here is as fine as anything you could wish, but there’s a big flaw at the back, though I don’t expect you’d ever notice it. I could never make really a good job of a bit of marble like that. It would be all right in the summer like this; it wouldn’t mind the blasted heat. But wait till the winter comes. There’s nothing quite like frost to find out the weak points in stone.”

“Then what’s it for?” I asked.

The man burst out laughing.

“You’d hardly believe me if I was to tell you it’s for an exhibition, but it’s the truth. Artists have exhibitions: so do grocers and butchers; we have them too. All the latest little things in headstones, you know.”

He went on to talk of marbles, which sort best withstood wind and rain, and which were easiest to work; then of his garden and a new sort of carnation he had bought. At the end of every other minute he would drop his tools, wipe his shining head, and curse the heat.

I said little, for I felt uneasy. There was something unnatural, uncanny, in meeting this man.

I tried at first to persuade myself that I had seen him before, that his face, unknown to me, had found a place in some out-of-the-way corner of my memory, but I knew that I was practising little more than a plausible piece of self-deception.

Mr. Atkinson finished his work, spat on the ground, and got up with a sigh of relief.

“There! what do you think of that?” he said, with an air of evident pride. The inscription which I read for the first time was this–

SACRED TO THE MEMORY

OF

JAMES CLARENCE WITHENCROFT.

BORN JAN. 18TH, 1860.

HE PASSED AWAY VERY SUDDENLY

ON AUGUST 20TH, 190–

“In the midst of life we are in death.”

For some time I sat in silence. Then a cold shudder ran down my spine. I asked him where he had seen the name.

“Oh, I didn’t see it anywhere,” replied Mr. Atkinson. “I wanted some name, and I put down the first that came into my head. Why do you want to know?”

“It’s a strange coincidence, but it happens to be mine.” He gave a long, low whistle.

“And the dates?”

“I can only answer for one of them, and that’s correct.”

“It’s a rum go!” he said.

But he knew less than I did. I told him of my morning’s work. I took the sketch from my pocket and showed it to him. As he looked, the expression of his face altered until it became more and more like that of the man I had drawn.

“And it was only the day before yesterday,” he said, “that I told Maria there were no such things as ghosts!”

Neither of us had seen a ghost, but I knew what he meant.

“You probably heard my name,” I said.

“And you must have seen me somewhere and have forgotten it! Were you at Clacton-on-Sea last July?”

I had never been to Clacton in my life. We were silent for some time. We were both looking at the same thing, the two dates on the gravestone, and one was right.

“Come inside and have some supper,” said Mr. Atkinson.

His wife was a cheerful little woman, with the flaky red cheeks of the country-bred. Her husband introduced me as a friend of his who was an artist. The result was unfortunate, for after the sardines and watercress had been removed, she brought out a Doré Bible, and I had to sit and express my admiration for nearly half an hour.

I went outside, and found Atkinson sitting on the gravestone smoking.

We resumed the conversation at the point we had left off. “You must excuse my asking,” I said, “but do you know of anything you’ve done for which you could be put on trial?”

He shook his head. “I’m not a bankrupt, the business is prosperous enough. Three years ago I gave turkeys to some of the guardians at Christmas, but that’s all I can think of. And they were small ones, too,” he added as an afterthought.

He got up, fetched a can from the porch, and began to water the flowers. “Twice a day regular in the hot weather,” he said, “and then the heat sometimes gets the better of the delicate ones. And ferns, good Lord! they could never stand it. Where do you live?”

I told him my address. It would take an hour’s quick walk to get back home.

“It’s like this,” he said. “We’ll look at the matter straight. If you go back home to-night, you take your chance of accidents. A cart may run over you, and there’s always banana skins and orange peel, to say nothing of fallen ladders.”

He spoke of the improbable with an intense seriousness that would have been laughable six hours before. But I did not laugh.

“The best thing we can do,” he continued, “is for you to stay here till twelve o’clock. We’ll go upstairs and smoke, it may be cooler inside.”

To my surprise I agreed.

We are sitting now in a long, low room beneath the eaves. Atkinson has sent his wife to bed. He himself is busy sharpening some tools at a little oilstone, smoking one of my cigars the while.

The air seems charged with thunder. I am writing this at a shaky table before the open window.

The leg is cracked, and Atkinson, who seems a handy man with his tools, is going to mend it as soon as he has finished putting an edge on his chisel.

It is after eleven now. I shall be gone in less than an hour.

But the heat is stifling.

It is enough to send a man mad.

The Clock

I liked your description of the people at the pension. I can just picture that rather sinister Miss Cornelius, with her toupee and clinking bangles. I don’t wonder you felt frightened that night when you found her sleepwalking in the corridor. But after all, why shouldn’t she sleepwalk? As to the movements of the furniture in the lounge on the Sunday, you are, I suppose, in an earthquake zone, though an earthquake seems too big an explanation for the ringing of that little handbell on the mantelpiece. It’s rather as if our parlour maid — another new one! — were to call a stray elephant to account for the teapot we found broken yesterday. You have at least, in Italy, escaped the eternal problem of maids.

Yes, my dear, I most certainly believe you. I have never had experiences quite like yours, but your mention of Miss Cornelius has reminded me of something rather similar that happened nearly twenty years ago, soon after I left school. I was staying with my aunt in Hampstead. You remember her, I expect; or, if not her, the poodle, Monsieur, that she used to make perform such pathetic tricks. There was another guest, whom I had never met before, a Mrs Caleb. She lived in Lewes and had been staying with my aunt for about a fortnight, recuperating after a series of domestic upheavals, which had culminated in her two servants leaving her at an hour’s notice – without any reason, according to Mrs Caleb, but I wondered. I had never seen the maids; I had seen Mrs Caleb and, frankly, I disliked her. She left the same sort of impression on me as I gather your Miss Cornelius leaves on you — something queer and secretive; underground, if you can use the expression, rather than underhand. And I could feel in my body that she did not like me.

It was summer. Joan Denton — you remember her; her husband was killed in Gallipoli — had suggested that I should go down to spend the day with her. Her people had rented a little cottage some three miles out of Lewes. We arranged a day. It was gloriously fine for a wonder, and I had planned to leave that stuffy old Hampstead house before the old ladies were astir. But Mrs Caleb waylaid me in the hall, just as I was going out.

“I wonder,” she said, “I wonder if you could do me a small favour. If you do have any time to spare in Lewes — only if you do — would you be so kind as to call at my house? I left a little travelling-clock there in the hurry of parting. If it’s not in the drawing-room, it will be in my bedroom or in one of the maids’ bedrooms. I know I lent it to the cook, who was a poor riser, but I can’t remember if she returned it. Would it be too much to ask? The house has been locked up for twelve days, but everything is in order. I have the keys here. The large one is for the garden gate, the small one for the front door.”

I could only accept, and she proceeded to tell me how I could find Ash Grove House.

“You will feel quite like a burglar,” she said. “But mind, it’s only if you have time to spare.”

As a matter of fact I found myself glad of any excuse to kill time. Poor old Joan had been taken suddenly ill in the night — they feared appendicitis — and though her people were very kind and asked me to stay to lunch, I could see that I should only be in the way, and made Mrs Caleb’s commission an excuse for an early departure.

I found Ash Grove without difficulty. It was a medium-sized red¬brick house, standing by itself in a high walled garden that bounded a narrow lane. A flagged path led from the gate to the front door, in front of which grew, not an ash, but a monkey-puzzle, that must have made the rooms unnecessarily gloomy. The side door, as I expected, was locked. The dining-room and drawing-room lay on either side of the hall and, as the windows of both were shuttered, I left the hall door open, and in the dim light looked round hurriedly for the clock, which, from what Mrs Caleb had said, I hardly expected to find in either of the downstairs rooms. It was neither on table nor mantelpiece. The rest of the furniture was carefully covered over with white dust-sheets. Then I went upstairs. But, before doing so, I closed the front door. I did in fact feel rather like a burglar, and I thought that if anyone did happen to see the front door open, I might have difficulty in explaining things.

Happily the upstairs windows were not shuttered. I made a hurried search of the principal bedrooms. They had been left in apple-pie order; nothing was out of place; but there was no sign of Mrs Caleb’s clock. The impression that the house gave me — you know the sense of personality that a house conveys — was neither pleasing nor displeasing, but it was stuffy, stuffy from the absence of fresh air, with an additional stuffiness added, that seemed to come out from the hangings and quilts and antimacassars. The corridor, onto which the bedrooms I had examined opened, communicated with a smaller wing, an older part of the house, I imagined, which contained a box-room and the maids’ sleeping-quarters. The last door that I unlocked (I should say that the doors of all the rooms were locked, and relocked by me after I had glanced inside them) contained the object of my search. Mrs Caleb’s travelling-clock was on the mantelpiece, ticking away merrily.

That was how I thought of it at first. And then for the first time I realised that there was something wrong. The clock had no business to be ticking. The house had been shut up for twelve days. No one had come in to air it or to light fires. I remember how Mrs Caleb had told my aunt that if she left the keys with a neighbour, she was never sure who might get hold of them. And yet the clock was going.

I wondered if some vibration had set the mechanism in motion, and pulled out my watch to see the time. It was five minutes to one. The clock on the mantelpiece said four minutes to the hour. Then, without quite knowing why, I shut the door on to the landing, locked myself in, and again looked round the room. Nothing was out of place. The only thing that might have called for remark was that there appeared to be a slight indentation on the pillow and the bed; but the mattress was a feather mattress, and you know how difficult it is to make them perfectly smooth. You won’t need to be told that I gave a hurried glance under the bed — do you remember your supposed burglar in Number Six at St Ursula’s? — and then, and much more reluctantly, opened the doors of two horribly capacious cupboards, both happily empty, except for a framed text with its face to the wall.

By this time I really was frightened. The clock went ticking on. I had a horrible feeling that an alarm might go off at any moment, and the thought of being in that empty house was almost too much for me. However, I made an attempt to pull myself together. It might after all be a fourteen-day clock. If it were, then it would be almost run down. I could roughly find out how long the clock had been going by winding it up. I hesitated to put the matter to the test, but the uncertainty was too much for me. I took it out of its case and began to wind. I had scarcely turned the winding-screw twice when it stopped. The clock clearly was not running down; the hands had been set in motion probably only an hour or two before.

I felt cold and faint and, going to the window, threw up the sash, letting in the sweet, live air of the garden. I knew now that the house was queer, horribly queer. Could someone be living in the house? Was someone else in the house now? I thought that I had been in all the rooms, but had I? I had only just opened the bathroom door, and I had certainly not opened any cupboards, except those in the room in which I was.

Then, as I stood by the open window, wondering what I should do next and feeling that I just couldn’t go down that corridor into the darkened hall to fumble at the latch of the front door with I don’t know what behind me, I heard a noise. It was very faint at first, and seemed to be coming from the stairs. It was a curious noise—not the noise of anyone climbing up the stairs, but — you will laugh if this letter reaches you by a morning post — of something hopping up the stairs, like a very big bird would hop. I heard it on the landing; it stopped. Then there was a curious scratching noise against one of the bedroom doors, the sort of noise you can make with the nail of your little finger scratching polished wood. Whatever it was, was coming slowly down the corridor, scratching at the doors as it went. I could stand it no longer. Nightmare pictures of locked doors opening filled my brain. I took up the clock, wrapped it in my Macintosh, and dropped it out of the window on to a flower-bed. Then I managed to crawl out of the window and, getting a grip of the sill, ‘successfully negotiated’, as the journalists would say, ‘a twelve-foot drop.’ So much for our much abused Gym at St Ursula’s. Picking up the Macintosh, I ran round to the front door and locked it. Then I felt I could breathe, but not until I was on the far side of the gate in the garden wall did I feel safe.

Then I remembered that the bedroom window was open. What was I to do? Wild horses wouldn’t have dragged me into that house again unaccompanied. I made up my mind to go to the police station and tell them everything. I should be laughed at, of course, and they might easily refuse to believe my story of Mrs Caleb’s commission. I had actually begun to walk down the lane in the direction of the town when I chanced to look back qt the house. The window that I had left open was shut.

No, my dear, I didn’t see any face or anything dreadful like that… and, of course, it may have shut by itself. It was an ordinary sash-window, and you know they are often difficult to keep open.

And the rest? Why, there’s really nothing more to tell. I didn’t even see Mrs Caleb again. She had had some sort of fainting fit just before lunchtime, my aunt informed me on my return, and had had to go to bed. Next morning I travelled down to Cornwall to join mother and the children. I thought I had forgotten all about it, but when three years later Uncle Charles suggested giving me a travelling-clock for a twenty-first birthday present, I was foolish enough to prefer the alternative that he offered, a collected edition of the works of Thomas Carlyle.

It’s these memories that rise during the hot and clammy moments in between fever dreams, and even though I’m dealing with a flu that my wife had given me, unintentionally, on my birthday, I can’t help but become a little sentimental. I’m an accountant now, for a decent firm. It’s boring work but it pays the bills and provides good insurance. I have a king-sized bed and the acne that once plagued my face has long since been defeated.

So, as I stare in the darkened reflection of the turned off television in front of my bed, sweating the sickness out, shivering at the same time, answering birthday calls and texts, I can’t help but think, with a sudden clarity of the interlocking gears, how things really came to pass, or if it was a fever dream of a memory at all.

I don’t know if the story of Mr. Guthrie’s Familiar is true, but if you look on any message board and crackpot website, they will tell you it is. I don’t know what I believe. But I know some kids went missing. I know some kids grew up to be adults like me.

At first it was just me, at sixteen. My dad told me to get a summer job, and while I wanted to play my Atari all day, he took the liberty to apply on my behalf to all of the “help wanted” stores in our town. At first I was annoyed in the way that teenagers are, but in hindsight I’m grateful. When I heard this, I was hoping to get called by for Beanz, the coffeeshop, but I wasn’t popular enough to fit their “look”. I also would not have minded becoming a cashier at the Sears. I would have been on my feet all day, but I’d be inside, and whenever I’ve gone in the workers seemed young enough. But instead, the only place to call me back was for a delivery boy at Comet Pizza, right at the end of Blueberry Street the town over. All I needed was a bike, which I had, and knowledge of the streets, which I also had.

On my first day, I rolled my bike up and was introduced to Bart, Clyde, and Lionel. Bart was the head delivery boy, which I didn’t know was a thing until that day. It’s really fascinating…I don’t think I had recalled any of their names until just now. Yes. That’s right. There were four of us. Each of us were pimple faced and greasy haired than the last. Well, five. Sort of.

Her name was Maria, and at the time I thought she was the prettiest girl I’d ever seen. Assuming she had not been stricken by some divine intervention, I imagine she had grown to become very beautiful now. She was the bosses’ daughter, and, like me, had been given a summer job. She was the counter girl, responsible for being the face of Comet Pizza, the empire she would no doubt inherit. She also took the calls, and I looked forward to hearing customers call in for a delivery so I could hear her voice.

I spent a large part of that first day sitting around and eating pizza, which was considered a tremendous perk at the time. The orientation was minimal; turns out, the training to be delivery boy meant being able to pedal fast. The three boys were on rotation, switching out every call.

They told me stories. Bart once delivered pizza to a house and a naked woman answered the door. Lionel once delivered to the science-teacher who flunked him last year and, with a whisper, said that he made a point of licking each slice before handing it off. After about four hours of sitting in the back, reading magazines and failing to talk to Maria, I got the impression that I
wasn’t going to be making any deliveries at all.

“Not yet,” said Bart, “there is a perfect house for you.”

“You mean, is it close?” I asked, “I go to school a town over. I know this town enough. And I’ve been studying a map for the past four hours.”

Clyde shook his head, “Just wait, padawan.

I remember this clearly, too. I hadn’t seen The Phantom Menace yet, but I was going to next week with my cousin. I remember being slightly offended after the fact.

Finally, a call came in and Maria’s wonderful voice occupied the room. She said, “One cheese pie for 451 Alberle Road.”

Then the boys lit up, and I knew it was my time to shine.

“That’s a good house,” said Lionel, his face buried in a magazine.

“You know where that is?” asked Bart.

I nodded.

“You been there before?” Bart furthered.

I shook my head.

“Why don’t one of us come with you?” Clyde said, suddenly standing. “Just in case you get lost.”

“It’s perfect first house,” Lionel said, “it was my first house. I was fine.”

“And Greg chose that as my first house when I started too,” Bart said. Greg was the previous head delivery boy, who I learned had only left because was off to college.

“I can do it,” I said, wanting to impress these guys. They weren’t my friends, but I was used to not having many friends. I did, however, see a lot of commonalities between them and me. We were all physically mishappen in our own ways. Lionel was a little plump. Bart walked bowlegged. Clyde was tall and lanky. The way that the three of them interacted with Maria told me they don’t talk to girls “in the real world” very much, and the number of books and magazines and comic books littered about the backroom told me that they spent a lot of their time in between pages.

“He’s fine,” said Bart. Then he turned to me, “You got this. Your first house. Then tomorrow you’ll come into the rotation with us and start making tips.”

“Sure,” I said, and received the pie from Maria, inhaled the fresh-bake aura, and put them in the warming container. My heart got a little fluttered.

She said, “Mr. Guthrie is a kind of weirdo. Just so you know. But if you can handle this one, the others will be easier. Trust me.” And she winked at me. I remember that very clearly. That wink.

Outside I got my bike out of its lock, fastened the container cradle onto the back of my bike, and latched the container so it fit snug. Clyde appeared next to me, curly hair pushed against the wind. The day had turned into swathes of tangerine and plum; twilight, but darkness by the time I’ll get back.

“Hey,” he said, “I just want you to know that Mr. Guthrie is sort of a weirdo.”

“That’s what Maria said,” I said, happy to bring up her name.

He shuffled on his feet, “Yeah, but I don’t think you understand, new guy. His house is kind of a rite-of-passage. When I started, they made me deliver to him too. And Greg, made Bart do it too. He’s in community college now. Not that it matters.”

“What, is he, like, a pedophile or something?”

“You haven’t heard about Mr. Guthrie’s Familiar?”

I took my bike and started to round down the path, past the beaten up cars of the pizza makers, the dumpsters, the pizza trailing savory vespers behind me. “C’mon man.”

“I’m not trying to scare you,” he said. “It’s just that if you get really weirded out, leave the pizzas on the porch. Knock if you feel like you have too. And then tail it out of there.”

I slanted my eyes. “Is this a trick? Tricking the new guy? Someone will have to pay for the pizzas.”

“No,” Clyde said, twisting his face, “I’ll pay for them when you come back.”

I took my bike to the road, waited for car to pass by. The street was lined with thick elms. They looked like talons pointing towards the sky. Clyde followed me.

“What’s the deal?” I snapped.

“Look,” he said, picking up his hat and rustling his greasy hair before popping it back on.“It’s just an urban myth. But I don’t think it is.”

Another car drove past. This was typically a busy street. If I had been alone I would have weaved my bike past the cars and taken off-beaten paths. I sometimes rode my bike in this town after school, so I knew the avenues well enough. I could feel Mr. Guthrie’s address like a beacon at the far end of the forest, nestled in the cul-de-sac that I could see in my mind’s eye. But I
didn’t want my new coworkers to think I was reckless.

“What is it then? The myth?” I said. “What’s the deal with his Familiar?”

Clyde chuckled, but it was a nervous chuckle. I would not realize until thirty years later how difficult this was for him. “The story goes that Mr. Guthrie used to be a really nice guy. He was a teacher, or a social worker, or something. A wife. Couple of kids. Then one day he must have accidentally purchased an antique or read something backwards or something because something entered his house and never came out. Something horrible. Like a mega-demon or something.”

“A mega-demon?” I said. “You’re making me late, you know.”

Clyde shivered. Another car zoomed past. He continued: “It was around that time that Mr. Guthrie lost his job. Started talking about a voice in his noggin. Said that voices need to feed and in exchange it would give him eternal life. Then his wife and kids disappeared.”

“No wonder. He went bonkers. She probably took the kids.” I looked down the road, found myself at the end of the collection of traffic. I kicked off my bike but Clyde grabbed me by the shoulders, which I remember even then being peeved about, even though he was, by some delivery boy hierarchy, my superior.

“They say that whatever may or may not have happened, Mr. Guthrie entered into a sort of relationship with this force. But it wasn’t an even trade off. And now the mega-demon is practically keeping the man hostage, said that if it doesn’t feed, it’ll feed on him.”

“C’mon,” I said, but Clyde pulled tighter.

“So he calls the shop every couple of weeks. Orders the same thing. A small cheese pie, with instructions to deliver personally. You know why he does that? Because delivery boys have a high turnover rate. And no one would miss us. Like Randall Fleck, that missing kid from the 80s? Yeah, he worked here for three days. Or what about Bobby Finch, you know, the same last name that’s above the hardware store? That’s his older brother. I’m telling you, Harold, just leave it on the porch.”

“Okay,” I said, realizing now that Clyde actually believed this. “How do you know all this?”

“You’ll find that most towns have a myth or two.”

“And you’ve done it, and Bart and Lionel,” I said, “I’ll be fine. I can outrun an old man.”

“I did,” Clyde said, and his eyes began to blossom, which, to this day, makes me uncomfortable whenever anyone does that. “And I saw…I saw something in the window…and…and I just stayed too long. Look. I can’t stop you, because I think I’m crazy too, but if you go, just leave it on the porch. If you come back and tell everyone you did it, I’ll back you up. I’ll tell them I tried to talk you out of it but you were adamant.”

I actually didn’t know what the word adamant meant at the time, but that didn’t stop me from pulling onto the road while Clyde kept yelling at me to just put it on the porch! I did my best to ignore his warnings, because I was too old to believe in that kind of stuff. It was this arrogance that armored me to the challenge that Bart and Lionel had imposed on me, this silly delivery boy rite-of-passage. But I so wanted them to like me, even though they hardly paid any attention to me. And I wanted Maria to know that I had done it. I could not imagine what would happen after the fact, but I wanted her to know

Yet Clyde’s fear was so genuine that I could not help running into it, itself manifesting like the road blocks my own bike was pedaling past. I turned corners and made sharp turns down bike lanes, but I could not help to feel as if I were slipping slowly into a quick sand of dread, especially knowing that Randall Fleck and Bobby Finch had possibly ridden these very paths, with the same kind of pie, made perhaps by the same pizza makers or Maria’s dad, Mr. Comet Pizza himself. Because I did knew those names.

Everyone knew those names.

I don’t recall Bobby Finch much, but his name sounded familiar because when Randall Fleck disappeared, they compared his absence to Bobby’s. I was too young then, as I was at this moment of delivery, to really appreciate the pattern of how close I was to this cycle, this myth. My parents took me to the school at night and all the kids played in the surreal version of the playground that we played at just this morning while the cops delivered their notes. That was before we grew up. That was before I developed my pimples and my long nose and my greasy hair.

I turned onto Aberle Road, and I recall very clearly being relieved to find the neighborhood exactly as boring as all neighborhoods should be. It had nothing to support Clyde’s tale. No ghosts, no hockey-masked men. Not even those black pedophile vans.

I took my bike down the street, looking up at the ocean of stars above, a view that doesn’t really exist, anymore. Then I came to 451 and for a second I thought the guys were playing a joke on me.

This stupid house, run down, looked as if had been set aflame and reduced to a charcoaled version of itself. The grass had turned into crisp, nettle-esque blades. The car had not been moved in ages, surrounded by the reclaimed nature. The house sulked, the eaves of the single rancher like heavy, weary eye brows on windows so dusty as to be one-way, even in the darkness. I actually rationalized that there was no way a married couple with two kids could fit comfortably in a house like that, so point against Clyde’s validity. Still, there was something foreboding about the house, as it stood like an animated corpse, washed up and chewed on like a sperm whale that had lost a fight with an octopus. Something had happened here.

One time my Uncle’s house had gone into foreclosure and when we came back it looked like Mr. Guthrie’s. So maybe that was it.
Except from the faint flicker of a lightbulb that swung at the far end of the house, a pendulum akin to an uvula.

I parked my back at the edge of the property. It felt rude to drive it across the lawn, not that I had any opportunities to do so. I put my hands in the container, felt the warmth from the pizza boxes. I looked around at the other houses. They seemed perfectly fine. Sleeping. I kicked the stand on my bike, leaned it, and remembered the operations. Knock on the door, wait a little bit, knock again, receive the cash, count it, make change, wait for the tip. The entire exchange should take no longer than it would take to reach the house. To reach the house. Maria said if I could do this, I could do anything.

So with the pizza balanced on my forklift spread out hands, I advanced through the thicket of overgrowth, over the uneven cobblestones, the tangle of weeds, the smell of rotting vegetables. I was certain that I could see the bent spokes of an abandoned bike, but it was an old model, so it must have been there for a long time. It was hard to think that kids once played on this lawn.
The porch was no more than a dais, unwalled, no handrail. It was like walking into the maw of a beast, or an altar. My footsteps echoed onto the empty street. There was a spot that reminded me of Clyde’s advice. A perfect square that I could drop the pie and run. I could be back on my bike now. But I would know that if I left, then I will have returned to Comet Pizza a liar. I did not want to have a secret with Clyde, one that would eventually reveal that I had failed the rite.

Balancing the pizza on my hip, I repositioned and rapped on the screen door. There was no doorbell. I waited, leaned to see if I could see inside. I knocked again. . A silhouette passed over the bulb. The sound of unlatching several bolts, each metal unlocking sending a shiver down the frame of the rickety door. The door opened and Mr. Guthrie appeared.

I remember him not looking particularly abrasive. Not fowl like, as Clyde had made him seem. He had not a lost eye nor a crooked nose nor an ugly scar. He looked more like a frail scarecrow, a farmer from that famous painting. Lips receded with age, hollows of his eyes from gravity’s chronal curse. Liverspots that could be countries on a map. Mr. Guthrie was just a
lonely old man. Simple as that.

“Pizza delivery,” I said, trying to sound cheery. In hindsight, I realize how stupidly ingenuine I must have sounded. I repeated the order: “One small cheese pie.”

Mr. Guthrie nodded. He grunted. He pushed open the screen door with a skeletal hand and then it was just the two of us, himself in the threshold, a black infinity behind him, me with the jungle of his unkempt lawn behind me.

“One small cheese pie for Mr. Guthrie?” I said, repositioning myself so that I held the box before me, like a token.

Mr. Guthrie licked his lips to wet them before speaking. His voice sounded unused, out of tune, as if the internal wiring was rusty. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a money clip. Yellow, cracked thumbnails sifted through the bills. A light flickered behind him, right over his shoulder, at the edge of the darkness. With shaking hands, he offered what I had hoped was the
correct amount on the first try, and it was at this precise moment, yes, I remember, that I felt that our interaction had become a group.

Something was here, had joined us. Some presence. There were three of us.

I felt like I was being watched, and a thought flashed within the undercurrent of my psyche that this was still one big joke by the delivery boys. Hazing and all that. That they would pop out of the brush with monster masks.

Mr. Guthrie handed me the bills. The cash was warm and damp. There were two twenties in there, which was more than enough for the pie. This money made my heart drop. I didn’t have the balance to hold both the pizza and make change, and I didn’t want to be there any longer than I had to. A second light had gone on behind him, two tiny lights as if at the end of a tunnel. A
breeze swept by, moving the bent wheel of broken bike that had become entombed by Mr. Guthrie’s unkempt lawn. Above the rancid odor of rotting vegetables, the smell of something copper carried with it. I got the sudden feeling of being on the precipice of some great void that had swept me, and my legs had a difficult time remaining steady. It felt like as if the shoddy cement cube of a porch was miles above the lawn, that I was, like, standing at the edge of a cliff or something.

Mr. Guthrie stared at me, unblinking, as I tried to make change.

“Keep it,” he said, “the change.”

“Thank you,” I said, and I felt something stir behind him, responding to my voice.

When I looked behind his bony shoulder I could make a faint outline of something. Something. That was it. It was human but it wasn’t. It was more like a painting, like something that was turned into human form, like a marble sculpture. The faraway lights turned into tiny jewels. I got the impression of it raising its eyebrows, for some reason. I tried handing Mr. Guthrie the pizza but he did not budge.

“Would you like me to leave it on the porch?” I said, gesturing to a spot, thinking about Clyde. No! something croaked, but it was underneath the passing tide of a car.

Mr. Guthrie said, “No. Please.”

“Okay,” I said, and pushed it a little further into his trembling hands. The hands receded. In the corner of my eye something black zipped around the corner. Like a black stray or something. “It’s yours.”

“I’m an old man,” said Mr. Guthrie, his voice craggy. There was a certain surreal quality about him, as if space warped within the aura of his presence, or that whatever lay behind his back knew that it was only a flesh wall between itself and the outside. He continued, his jaw dropping slightly out of sync with his words. “I’m an old man. Can you help an old man. Please.”

I didn’t say anything. Clyde said to just put it on the porch, and I already had the cash.

“Could you help an old man and come inside and put it on my kitchen table?” said Mr. Guthrie, his wiry frame twisting slightly, the creases of his splotchy, greasy shirt forming an obscure Rorschach simulacrum.

“Excuse me?”

“Please, I’m an old man. I can hardly lift the box,” he said, rustle in the wind sounded like come inside and then he said, his voice deeper, more coming from within his frail frame thanfrom just his mouth. “Please.”

A windchime somewhere startled me. I felt something move in accordance with my sudden movement, jumped to action. Another whistle said come inside again. I think.

“Others have done it,” Mr. Guthrie said, “other young boys.”

I don’t remember exactly when I dropped the pizza box in the corner of the porch, but I do remember, in hindsight, being unsettled. That the world had suddenly become very unsafe, not for greasy losers like me. There was a figure behind Mr. Guthrie, something vague and shapeless, too far for me to see, to enveloped in the blackness of the house. The pungent smell of
garlic breath seeped from the cracks in the sheeting, from the black void behind Mr. Guthrie. When I put the boxes in the corner and stood, I saw, maybe, I don’t know. I saw Mr. Guthrie floating several inches off the lip of his front door, his dirtied loafers dipping slightly to give the impression of a ballerina on their toes.

There was a loud noise, a honking of a car or some strong gust of wind, and I left Mr. Guthrie on the porch, walking backwards at first, tripping over the step and into the thicket, grabbing onto the overgrown bike and cutting my hands as I ran across his lawn and hopped onto my own bike. Before kicking off I looked over my shoulder and saw that lone bulb, moving like a pendulum with such force as to be resistant to all logic of gravity. It was swinging like a kid that tries to circulate a swing set with the force of their momentum. On the downswing of the light Mr. Guthrie’s lanky figure appeared underneath it, shoulders hunched, arms as if guarding from something.

“I’m sorry!” Mr. Guthrie yelled, but I was already speedily away so I couldn’t be sure if it was for me or not.

I had no idea how out of sorts I was until I returned to the Comet Pizza. Grass stains over my knees, my new Comet Pizza shirt had been chewed by the reclaimed bike on his lawn. I must have scratched my cheek to, for a small of curtain of blood now lined down my chin. I parked my bike, walked into the warm glow of the Comet Pizza.

The others looked up from their magazines. Clyde seemed visibly relaxed. Maria noticed my cut and she offered me a rag, and I hoped that interaction meant more to both of us.

“How was it?” Said Lionel, counting his tips, not really looking at me.

“You looked like you got chewed on and spit out,” Bart said.

“Yeah,” I said, and sat down. Someone brought me a slice of pizza.

Clyde leaned over and whispered, “Did you leave it on the porch?”

I nodded, my mouth chewing the pepperoni and mushroom. “He left a nice tip.”

“He always does,” Bart said, shaking his head.

“He’ll call again in a couple of weeks?” I asked, wiping my mouth.

Lionel nodded. “Yeah. Listen, I know Clyde tried talking you out of it. Glad that you went through with it. In the future though, just leave it on the porch and don’t stay for chit-chat.”

“Guy’s got nothing to say anyway,” said Bart.

On the way out the four of us said goodbye to Maria and went back to our bikes. I noticed a strange, almost black tar smudged on my seat, and Lionel pointed out that a similar smear was on my lower back too.

“Take a shower, new guy, and see you tomorrow,” he said.

Before leaving Clyde approached me again. “Hey,” he said, “did you really leave it on the porch like I asked?”

I nodded. “But not originally though.”

This seemed to shake Clyde, who fell silent. “So you met him. Did you…see it?”

“It?”

“Mr. Guthrie’s Familiar. What did it look like?”

I shook my head. I wasn’t trying to be coy but it was true. I could quite place what I had seen on Mr. Guthrie’s porch, could not prove exactly if I had seen anything at all. I shook my head and said, “Next time I’m really just going to leave it on the porch. Anyway thanks, Clyde. For the advice.”

“Yeah, sure,” he smiled, seemingly pleased to be validated. It was a feeling that I yearned for too. I felt his eyes trail me as I kicked my bike into gear to follow the others down the road, and then soon it was the four of us riding home, each together, before going our separate ways until tomorrow.

I don’t really remember Mr. Guthrie calling Comet Pizza much that summer, or at all. I hardly remember the rest of that summer, much in the way that all summers blend when you’re young. I didn’t lose my virginity, hardly had a summer fling. I don’t really remember hanging out with Bart, Lionel, or Clyde much outside of the shop, and Maria and I’s only real interaction was when she handed me a pizza for delivery. It was only a dumb summer job, one that consisted of a bunch of teenagers who hardly knew themselves, buried themselves in magazines and yo-yos and the occasional cigarette to look cool.

Mr. Guthrie himself was discovered half a year later in his house, his body reportedly looking like a dropped napkin in the middle of the floor, discovered after the neighbors complained of the rotting smell that had begun to invade the cul-de-sac.

It’s funny, how memories like this pop up in the middle of fever dreams, blossoming like stubborn flowers in the snow. Those two kids, Bobby Finch and Randall Fleck, were the only ones that had disappeared from town, so hardly any excuse to fuel the urban legend. But there were no calls. I guess I was the last. I don’t know if Mr. Guthrie’s familiar was real, but the memory feels on the precipice of reality, like how when you’re young you climb because you don’t realize how high you are, or the consequences of falling, and when you think back all you can remember is not how high you were, but how close the edge you were.

Mr. Guthrie was like that, for me, so inconsequential as to be buried in my mind, yet so significant for reasons that I
can not as of yet determine.

But one thing is for certain, though. If Mr. Guthrie’s Familiar was real, I don’t think it’s dead. I also don’t think that whatever is it was the Familiar. I think Mr. Guthrie was the Familiar, and whatever held tenancy in his house was the real source of life, however insulting to all parties it was.

But we get older, and our fears turn into memories we can assess and rehabilitate into bite-size, harmless chunks. Things like Mr. Guthrie’s familiar turn out to be just that; wisps of teenage imagination made all too real by our still forming volcanic minds, nothing of tangible value.

But I could be wrong.

I cannot remember my father or my mother; oh, wretched that I am! Had I either to love one whom no man loves? No, I cannot remember. My memory goes back three months—no further. Every day I live those three months over and over again.

I had too much money when I came of age. I knew not how to use it. I threw it here and there, ever indulging in my own pleasure. Playing in the world till the dust of it rose up and clouded my eyes—till the hand of innocence I held in mine was changed for the hand of sin.

Playing in a world that I was sent to work in, I forgot I had a soul or that there was a God who had given it to me. I played until my selfish indulgences brought upon me the sickness of death. And then my three months of Hell commenced. Unloved, unfriended, I tossed upon my bed, blaspheming a God I did not believe in, swearing I would not die. Shrieking in my terror of that Hell, I felt myself approaching a Hell I had so often scoffed at. I heard my screams re-echo through the empty house, unreplied to, making my desolation complete. Then I lay still, gasping on my bed; so would my prayers soar up to Heaven, I thought, unanswered, unheard. But stay! a step on the stairs—nearer, nearer; the door has opened, and a man stands upon the threshold. Oh, eyes that beamed peace and love, you saved me from Heaven’s vengeance for the moment—at what a cost! He came forward into the room when he saw me, and I thought for an instant it was an angel sent to comfort my misery.

“I heard you call,” he said; “and, fearing you were ill, I entered. I am your neighbour, my latch-key fits your door. You must pardon my coming, but, thinking you were ill—and alone——”

“I am alone,” I said—”alone, alone, deserted alike by God and man. Body and soul I am alone, and sick unto death.”

“Despair not, my friend,” said he. “I will attend you; you are sick, and morbid from being left alone. Rouse yourself, and I will try and help.”

“Help me! no man can help me; I have helped no man. Unless you can give me another life to live with the knowledge I have of this.”

“My dear friend, God alone can do that,” his voice went on soothingly; “but you are truly sorry for your past?”

“Man,” I cried, “there are no such things as death-bed repentances. Death is ever beside us a yawning precipice; as we walk along its edge we know that it is there. We look at the sky above it, at the flowers by its brink, but we never look at it; we turn our heads away, but we know that it is there. We feel the chill of it in the heat of the sun. We see its shadow on the petals of the flowers. We know that a false step, a stumble, and we are gone, plunged into Eternity in a moment. We say that sometime this path must come to an end, as we but follow it to our extermination, and when we see before us the black doors of death, then will we lay aside our flowers, and still our songs and laughter. And Heaven will pity our prayers and sighs. Talk not to me of such repentances; I believe them not, nor you, nor any man.”

“You are very ill,” the stranger said, as I raved on.

“I will not die, I must live, though Heaven itself has shut its gates upon me. Hell—if such is my destination—must give me a year of life. I say, I will not die.” A strange strength seemed to flow through my veins. I raised myself on my elbow. The stranger was standing at my bedside looking with divine pity at my convulsed face.

“You,” I said. Oh, the horror of it! “You must die, you with your life of purity behind you; death should have no fears for you. The gates of Heaven are open for you; give me your body, your life, and let me live.”

“Friend,” he said, as though humouring me, “I cannot die; I have a mother who is old and requires my care, and a child, a darling little child.”

“You must die!” I cried again. “I will care for your mother and child. You must die and let me live—I say, I will not die.”

“You are very ill,” was all he said, laying his hand upon my brow. And then, I know not how it came to pass, whether my cry to Heaven or Hell had been answered, or, whatever it was, by some great effort of my will, but I stood by the bed looking down at my own sleeping body. I dashed across the room to the glass. It was the stranger it reflected back—yes, the same high forehead, with fair, wavy hair, the same large, dreamy eyes; but his soul, ah! his soul lay sleeping in that motionless form upon the bed. I turned and left the haunted room, living, living, living!

II

Living, living—oh, the joy of it! I had died and was born again. How it came about, what cared I? “Who,” I thought, as I bounded down the stairs, “so fortunate as I?” What man or woman thinking over the past has not said—”Oh, could I but live my life over again, I would not have done this thing or that”? And I, with my evil past laid out before me, could live it again, casting out the weeds and cultivating the trodden flowers; with nothing to hinder me, not even the sensual flesh that lay upstairs, a prison-house for the spirit of that good man whose body I was inhabiting and whose life I proposed to live.

I closed the door of my own house and went up the tiny garden to the next; as I did so, I heard the patter of little feet and a childish voice calling, “Here’s papa! Here’s papa!”

I opened the door and took the little darling into my arms. Never had I felt such happiness as when the innocent parted lips met mine and the soft baby-hands went round my neck. I stood still to take in the joy of it, but the child drew back in my arms and for a moment she sat quite quiet, and then she struggled until I had to let her down.

“It’s not my papa!” she sobbed, running into the little sitting-room. “Oh, gran’ma, ’tis not my own papa!”

Mechanically I hung my hat upon the rack in the hall and followed the child. The room was small, but very bright and cosy; an old lady was seated in an arm-chair before the blazing fire; one withered hand was laid caressingly upon the golden head of the little girl, the other shaded her eyes as she anxiously watched the door. When I entered she smiled and turned to the weeping child.

“Why, what ailed you, darling? Look, Rosy, it is your own papa.”

Rosy looked up through her tears, and, seeing me standing in the full glare of the lamp and fire, ran to me again. I sat down in a low chair opposite the old woman, and the little child climbed on to my knees.

“It’s my dood papa,” she said, laying her wet cheek against mine.

For an hour I sat thus tasting for the first time the joy of a home, and listening to the old woman as she told me tales of her son’s youth—my youth now.

For some time she rambled on, in the fashion of the old, and at last for very joy I laughed aloud, waking the child, who had fallen asleep in my arms.

“Will you take her up to bed, Gilbert,” said her grandmother; “she sat up for you that you might put her to sleep to-night.”

I raised the child in my arms, the pretty little babe with her soft curls falling across her face, and she laid her drowsy head upon my shoulder. I pressed her with joy to my breast as I turned up the narrow, dark stairs; at my movement she sat up suddenly and pushed me from her with both her tiny hands. Oh, wonderful instinct of the child that in the light beheld her father, but in darkness knew me for a stranger!

“You’re not my papa! Oh, I want papa!”

“Hush, hush!” I whispered; “I am your papa.”

“You’re not, you’re not!” and she beat upon my breast with both her tiny fists.

“Give me my own papa, you bad, bad man!”

Then a great fury seized me, and I held her over the banisters.

“Call me your father, or I let you go.”

“No, no; I want my own papa!”

“Call me your father, or I let you go.”

“I want my dood papa!”

I did not mean it, Heaven knows I did not mean it, but my fingers loosed their hold. I shook the little hands from their terrified grasp upon my coat. The hall echoed the screams of a child and a sickening thud on the flags beneath. A terrible laugh followed, a laugh that might have come from the lowest pits of Hell. Was it I who uttered it? I looked into the hall beneath me. A trembling old woman knelt there, and, at her side, a servant with a lighted candle, but their white faces were not turned to the motionless body at their feet, but towards me, unspeaking, as though they were frozen by some terrible sight or sound. Had a devil entered into the body of Gilbert Graham during the time my spirit was passing from my own to it—a devil who, making me work its will, thus laughed in its hideous triumph. Surely devils were many round my bed when I lay dying. Its power had left me now, and I went, in bitter remorse, to the little child.

“She slipped from my arms,” I whispered. “She slipped, mother.”

She answered me nothing; but, as I raised the senseless babe, the servant sobbed, “Oh, Master Gilbert, we thought the shock had sent you mad!”

I laid the child upon the sofa, while the girl ran for a doctor. I stood as though stunned until he came, watching him then in a dream as he examined the soft limbs of the poor babe, and he shook his head as he arose.

“I am sorry to have to tell you that if she lives she will be a cripple all her life.”

“Tell my mother,” I whispered. I was not the one to tell her this.

“I am sorry,” he said; “I am very sorry, Madam.”

“Hush!” the old woman answered; “hush! You will waken her.”

“She may never waken,” he whispered “Bear up, dear Madam.”

“Hush!” the old woman said again, touching the golden curls that were stained with blood. “Hush! The fairies have come to her and laid red poppies in her hair.”

And thus had I fulfilled my trust to care for his mother and child—one a cripple or dead, the other a muttering idiot.

I had launched my new life, and the waters that bore it were red human blood; but who or what was the dread pilot that guided it?

III

I stole out into the dimly lighted street. Of what use was I at home?

The little child still lingered. The old woman was still happy in her ignorance, babbling of fairies and red poppies. My hands were the fairies that had laid those terrible flowers on her babe’s fair head, the sleep-giving poppies on her eyes.

The paper-boys were shouting in my ears as I passed, but I paid no attention to them. Their “terrible tragedies” could not equal mine; their cries of “Murder!” woke no horror in my heart; they only cried aloud the word that echoed there. I dare not think of the imprisoned soul that lay as dead in my room—the only one who sought me out in my hour of death’s despair. My horrible cries, that had frightened the very servants from my house, but hastened his feet to my side; and now he slept, a thin wall between him and the reward I had given him—a ruined home.

Oh, how could I hear the city noises and a thousand cries within my breast—a thousand little hands beating upon my heart, “Give back! give back!”

And so I strode through the damp fog, caring not, thinking not where I was going. At last a bright light flashed in my eyes, and I started as though awaking. Before me was a lighted doorway, and above it, in the light of the lamp, hung a board, and upon it in red letters the word “Billiards.” The place was a gambling-hell. I had known it but too well in the old days. I gazed about, half-hearing some one speaking, and saw a young man before me, his face flushed and his eyelids drooping.

“I could not help it, Graham; indeed I could not! I tried to keep away because of my promise to you and for my mother’s sake.”

His promise to me! I almost laughed aloud. Yes, I knew that boyish, effeminate face. It had been often opposite to me at the gambling-table inside. I had seen it grow white and tortured as the game went on. I had made its hairless lips grow sweet in a smile, or quiver pathetically like a girl’s, by the turn of my hand; I had lured him on night after night with a hope I held between my fingers. His promise to me! I had forgotten. Something evil was rising in my heart. I felt it would claim my lips if I did not speak. I seized his arm.

“Go home,” I said; “heed not what I may say to you after this, heed not what I may seem to you. The most beautiful statue is but hollow and moulded in common clay. The tiger’s claws are soft as a lady’s cheek, but they will tear you to pieces if you trust them. The moth sees the candle’s flame, and, thinking it fair, he dies. I am not as you think——”

“I do not know what you mean, Graham. If you mean this den has any fairness for me, it is not so, unless it be the fascination of the bird to the serpent’s eye.”

“Leave me!” I cried despairingly, for devils’ words were rising to my lips; and as he did not heed me, I turned and spoke them.

“Come in with me,” I said, and laughed. “Come in with me, and I shall see fair play.”

“With you!” He started. “With you, Graham! you who have preached of its dangers to me and its temptations and wickedness; you to whom I looked to save me from where it will lead me. Oh, Graham! I could laugh, ’tis so absurd!”

“I’ll see fair play,” I said again; “besides, you could not break yourself of the habit so easily and abruptly—I will wean you from it by degrees.”

I took his arm, and we passed inside. No one took any notice of me when we entered, but they all gathered around my companion.

“Why, Varen, we thought you were going to leave us?”

“Did you hear of the discovery in Harrington Street last night? Poor Bulger! You remember Bulger, don’t you? You lost a cool hundred to him one night here over the cards, eh? Got a cataleptic fit, they say; most interesting case. Went home in a most distressing state of mind the other night, commenced shouting like the devil, frightened the servant out of her wits and out of the house—says she hid in a doorway till dawn, afraid to go back; then she screwed up her courage and stole to the house; finding no answer to her knocks, and being unable to open the door, became alarmed, started for the police-station, and returned with some of the force. One got into the house by a low window and opened the door to the rest; they found poor Bulger lying on his bed—they thought—dead as a herring, but the doctors say ’tis a most interesting case of catalepsy.”

I listened without speaking. “What a queer old world it is!” I thought; “we must have a name for everything, no matter how wonderful, or where would our doctors and men of science be? Nothing is left to the God who designed the whole. Our beliefs are superstitions, we laugh them away; we would explain the very law of life itself.”

A hand was laid upon my arm.

“Play a game of cards, Graham? The fellows are asking me.”

“No, no; this is no place for you—for me. Come out of it quickly.”

But the men surrounded us.

“You are not going yet? just one game, then?”

Fool that I was, I complied, and took my seat at the table. They thought I was a “green one,” as was evident from their surprised looks when I swept up their little pile of silver at the end of the first game.

“You would think it was old Bulger himself,” I heard one say; “he seems to have his accursed luck.”

One game led to another; my companion’s face grew pale; some demon arose within me, and I took a pleasure in its paleness.

Why is it innocence attracts the guilty so? Behind the bar connected with this card-room there was a young girl serving. I heard men make rude jests that brought the colour to her cheeks; she would hang her head if they called her endearing names, and the angry tears would spring to her eyes: she would shake off their hands with passion. For this girl they would leave their billiards and their cards to watch the red and white fly to her face; and now, when they speak to her, she answers their jests with similar ones; she answers their calls with a simper; she courts their caresses and their company; she is no longer attractive to them—she is one of themselves.

Why did I not pick out my prey among those evil, coarse faces—why did I seek to destroy the one exception? I know not; life preys upon that which is weaker than itself, not that which is its equal.

I swept pile after pile of silver into my pockets, Varen’s white face growing whiter and whiter. At last he started to his feet—

“I’m cleared out—I have only a shilling left; I’m going home.”

“Put it down,” I said to him. “Why, man, you may win a pile on it yet. Finish this round, anyway.”

Sullenly he sat down again and took up his cards.

I let him win game after game, and when he rose to depart he had won back a third of his losses.

“I’ll come again to-morrow night and win the rest,” he said, with a smile.

Why follow the downfall of that young life? Night after night we met in the same place, I hastening away from the ceaseless crying of a little, suffering child, calling for the father I had robbed her of; he from the complaints of a broken-hearted mother, powerless to draw her only son from the snare I had set for him. Night after night I robbed him of his earnings, leaving him to win back a third, to lure him with a hope, never to be fulfilled, that the next time he might win a fortune.

Paler each night grew the young face, shabbier the clothes, thinner the hands that grasped the cards so eagerly. Now he spoke no word of greeting to me; only his eyes revealed his thoughts: therein I could see the light of hope gleam faintly each night, fading, fading to give place to despair, returning again as the closing hours approached and the waiter’s voice warned us it was time to stop.

One night Varen came hastily in, staggering as though he were drunk. Flinging himself down in a chair, he took his cards. There was no hope in his eyes; I saw only terrible anguish and despair. On one sleeve of his shabby coat I saw a broad band of crape.

He played wildly—and won. I had slain my devil; he won again; I was glad. I saw his silver flow back to him; I was happy for the first time in many a weary hour. “I shall no longer be his curse,” I thought; “through me he shall win back his fortune, his mother’s blessing, his lost youth. I shall restore all.”

A cry recalled me. I had been dreaming. I gazed around bewildered; the candles were spluttering in their sockets, and on the side of one was a great roll of wax. It was turned towards Varen—I had heard old wives call it a winding-sheet. The dust of the day before lay white on the sideboard and table, disturbed only where the cards fell and by the track of our fingers. The dawn was creeping through the half-closed shutters of the window, making our faces grey and ghastly in the two lights.

Young Varen was staring at me with mad eyes, and on the table at my side lay a heap of silver. It was I who had been winning.

Varen leaned across the table and gazed into my face.

“Are you a man,” he said, “or are you a devil?”

I did not answer, but that terrible thing within me broke into a laugh. The men beside me started in horror as the sound came forth and echoed round the room as though a demon were in each corner to repeat it.

Varen’s hand went to his breast.

“Devil in the shape of a man,” he said, “your work is done! Crudest of enemies in the guise of a friend! You won my trust and led me to this. What is pure, since you I believed so pure are as you are? What is the reward of love, since you I have loved reward me so? Through your aid I was fighting the old life from me, and rising to honour and esteem, to the knowledge of a mother’s proud heart. And through your aid I fell to meanness and disgrace, to see a mother robbed of her necessaries, and worse—to lose her son’s love and care and to die broken-hearted alone. Your hand had saved me from the precipice of Hell, and your hand it is that flings me into its hottest fire. Finish, then, your devil’s work, for I dare not!”

He drew a pistol from his breast and handed it to me. I felt the cold steel in my hand, and saw the horrified looks of the men around us; they seemed powerless to cry out or interrupt us; before me the ghastly face of young Varen. A wild rage rose up in my heart; I panted like a mad dog, and foam fell from my mouth. I tried to pray, but could not.

A pistol-shot rang through the room, and the white face before me vanished. There was hot blood upon my hands; a terror seized me—what had I done? Hands were upon my shoulders. But I escaped them. I flew down the creaking stairs. People were shouting. Steps were coming after me. I flung wide the door and flew wildly, blindly, down the street. Feet were repeating the echo of mine. People were calling “Murder! murder!” Windows were flung open, men joined in the chase. People were calling “Murder!”—and my hands were red with blood. Ha! the well-known door—it was my own; his latch-key opened it. I let myself in and flew upstairs; there was a light in my old room; a nurse sat nodding over the fire. I saw my old form lying motionless upon the bed. I sprang to its side. Voices were calling at the hall-door—men were breaking it in. They had tracked me.

I seized the hand that lay upon the counterpane; a shudder ran through it. Steps were at the door, “Murder” ran through the house. There was a moment of nothingness and I woke.

It was all a terrible dream; I lay upon my own bed. The kind neighbour, hearing my cry, had called in to see if I needed anything; he was looking down with pity in his eyes, his hands cooling mine—he had dipped them in water. No! it was blood, BLOOD! and the room rang with the cries of “MURDERER!” I started up; they were putting manacles on his wrists. He was stunned, he knew not what to say; he answered not their insinuations, but passed his manacled hands now and again across his eyes, like a man who had been long sleeping.

A terrible laugh sounded round the room; it seemed to float through the doorway, and we heard it echo down the house, fading away into stillness. I tried to rise and speak, but fell back unconscious.

IV

I awoke to misery and despair. Lying still a moment, to gather my thoughts together, I heard some persons talking at the head of my bed. It was the nurse and a couple of men, doctors I soon knew them to be. They were talking excitedly, but in subdued voices; I heard every word distinctly: “Graham is to be hanged for the murder of young Varen.” I started up, gazing at them in agony.

“He did not do it. I, and I alone, am guilty.”

They had started back when I moved, in astonishment; but when I spoke they came beside me, trying to soothe me and make me lie down and rest again. To rest! O Heaven! there was no more rest for me in this world.

I told them I would explain, but they would not let me speak. I heard them whisper of my most extraordinary case. They thought I had gained consciousness while they were speaking of Graham, and, hearing their words at that critical moment, took the idea into my head that I had committed the crime.

“Let me go!” I moaned; “let me go!”

But they held me down in their cruel kindness till I had to do their bidding from very weakness.

But when the night came on, and when the old nurse was nodding in her chair, I arose in the darkness and went from the house. Up and down the streets I wandered till dawn grew grey, but no dawn arose in my heart, only black night for ever. Through the streets, never stopping, I walked till the sun grew hot and bright, and people crowded out into the pathways. I bought a paper from a newsvendor, and read the trial of Gilbert Graham. It was nearly over; all the evidence was against him. He had nothing to say for himself; once he spoke to ask if he might see his little child, and he was told she was dead. They said he seemed stunned, or as though in a dream. I read no more.

When the court was opened, and the trial came on again, I hid myself among the crowd that attended it. I saw the prisoner at the bar; he was not pale; a colour tinged his cheeks. He seemed as if he were asleep. I do not think he heard anything of what was going on. Witness after witness came to condemn him. I could not bear it. I put myself forward as a witness for the defence. They allowed me into the box. I tried to tell my story, but they would not listen to me; some laughed; some pitied me; but they would not let me speak.

“Will you not hear me?” I cried. “You cannot understand, but do not laugh; there are so many things men know nothing of, but do not scorn them because you do not understand them. Can you know what gives life to the smallest insect living on this earth? Can you explore a step beyond the grave? You cannot. I alone am guilty of this murder; by my own act, or by the act of Heaven or Hell, I know not.”

A gentleman rose in the court; he sent a message to the Judge, whispered to a constable, and I was dragged out of the house. I heard a murmur of excited voices and a whisper.

“‘Tis that poor fellow Bulger; they say his brain is turned since he had his cataleptic attack.”

I was forced along by my doctor, his arm linked in mine. Calling a cab, he put me inside, and was about to follow, when a friend of his came up and spoke to him.

“Oh, yes,” he answered, “I thought I’d find him there. He woke to consciousness just as Dr. Gill and myself were speaking of young Varen’s death, and he seemed to get it into his head that he was the murderer. He escaped from the house last night, but from his ravings I thought it probable I should find him at court to-day.”

I heard no more. Silently opening the door furthest from the speaker, I slipped out, and in the dusk of the evening made my escape.

How the night passed I know not, but, when the light came, I had but one thought: to seek out Graham and beg his forgiveness. Again I bought a morning paper, and read the finish of the trial. Graham was condemned to death.

After a day’s wandering, or maybe more—I knew nothing of time in those blank hours—I found out the prison where he lay awaiting his doom, and craved admittance, saying I was a particular friend—a friend!

They let me see him for a moment, but he did not know me. He even smiled when I asked his forgiveness; even he would not believe me.

“I do not understand it at all,” he said, laying his head on his hand wearily. “I cannot think, I cannot even feel these last few days,” and then raised his head and gazed at me eagerly. “Do you know anything of my mother?”

I did not know of her, and turned away my face.

“I had a child!” he cried. “Oh, tell me of my little child!”

“Do you not remember?—she is dead,” I told him, weeping.

He leaned his head upon his hand again. “I had forgotten.”

He spoke no more to me, and I was taken out of the place. “He will forgive me to-morrow,” I said.

But, hidden away in a low lodging-house, I was too ill to stir for many days; then early one morning I found myself at the prison door again; it opened for me readily, and when it closed I found myself confronted by my doctor and some of his friends.

“I thought our patient would turn up sooner or later,” he said. “How fortunate you should choose the time we are here!”

“I will go anywhere you will if you but let me see him once again,” I cried; “only once till he forgives me. Let me go! I must!” I cried, fighting them. “I cannot live unless I get his pardon.”

“You cannot see him,” they said.

“But I will—I must!”

“You cannot—he was hanged this morning at seven.”

The girl was leaning forward, gazing into the fire. She had straight features, redeemed from insignificance by the keen intelligence of their expression; but this intelligence in its turn, was rendered almost repellant by the exceeding hardness of its practicality. She looked pale and tired, and as a girl clerk is wont to do in the evening.

The woman also looked weary, as though she, too, had done a hard day’s work. But in everything else the two countenances were sharply contrasted. The woman’s was a strong face, and one that five and forty years of life might easily have rendered grim, but its dominant characteristic was a steady gentleness. The irregular features spoke not merely of intelligence, but of shrewd, well-developed brain power. She was leaning back in her chair, looking absently before her, when the girl spoke suddenly.

“Miss Lanyon,” she said, “I don’t understand you. You are so clever! You ought to be a materialist pure and simple. Your books are splendidly up to date in some ways, yet there is always that sad, old-fashioned, semi-Christian crank in them.”

Apparently Miss Lanyon knew of something less offensive beneath the aggressive opinionativeness of the girlish personality for she answered with an odd little smile. Her voice was brisk and her utterance quick and decided.

“It’s a great affliction to find oneself old-fashioned in these days,” she said. “It is very kind of you not to despise me wholesale, Frances. As to materialism—well, I thought with you once upon a time. Ten years ago I fancy I should have satisfied you, altogether; and very little you would have liked me, if you did but know it.”

The girl answered with a quick exclamation.

“You have been a materialist, then!” she exclaimed. “And you gave up certainties for these vague theories! Well, I must say that astonishes me!”

“I am glad to hear that you are capable of astonishment,” was the quick, quaintly-uttered rejoinder. Then Miss Lanyon paused. She glanced at her companion’s face, and spoke impulsively. “I don’t imagine it will make the slightest impression on you,” she said. “Second-hand experiences are never of the faintest use. But I will tell you of something that happened to me ten years ago. Mind, I don’t say that my present opinions, whatever they may be, are the direct outcome of that experience. Never mind now how opinions develop; you’ll know some day. It simply showed me that materialism, at any rate, wouldn’t do—that there was a vast tract of country which it failed to take into account. Would you like to hear about it?”

Hardly waiting for the girl’s quick assent, leaning back in her chair with something about her whole figure, even in the uncertain light of the shaded lamp a trifle tense, Miss Lanyon began to speak again.

“Ten years ago,” she said “I had not taken to writing books, and was a mistress in the High School at Norwich. I am not an imaginative woman, and in those days I held all the views most eminently qualified to stultifying such a quality. A woman devoid of any spiritual sense, without faith, and without romance, very seldom a pleasant creature. I was a conspicuously unpleasant specimen of the type, I imagine that is to say, I was as hard and self-satisfied as the most advanced woman need wish to be.

“It was the middle of the Christmas term. I had come up to town on a Saturday afternoon on business, and was returning to Norwich on Sunday evening. My train was to leave Liverpool Street at 6.15, and my brother, at whose house I had been staying, considered it his duty to go with me to the station.

“We had no time to spare when we reached Liverpool Street. I had a return ticket, and only a hand-bag by way of luggage, and we went straight through to the platform. I was travelling first class—a favourite extravagance of mine in these days—and we walked up the train to look for a carriage.

“As it was Sunday night, few people were travelling; but, on the other hand, few first-class compartments were provided. We looked into several, only to find that my favourite corners facing the engine were occupied, until we had almost reached the top of the train.

“The third carriage from the engine was a first, but I had noticed two or three people, after glancing into it, hesitate, and then pass down the train. Consequently, I was not surprised to see my brother, who was a few steps in front of me, pass it also, almost without looking into it. I was very much surprised however, when I passed it myself, to see that it was absolutely empty. I stopped, and called to my brother.

“‘Where are your eyes, Edward?’ I said. ‘This carriage is just the thing. It’s empty.’

“He turned back with a kind of vague dissatisfaction on his face. “‘Is it?’ he said. ‘Oh, I suppose it’s all right then.’

“I had opened the door by that time, and, as he still hesitated, I got in. I did not take the corner nearest the door by which I had entered, as one naturally does, but I went instinctively, and without thinking about it, to the other end. I put down my book and umbrella on the seat there, and then my brother got in with my bag. He made no comment on my choice of a seat, and got out again rather quickly.

“‘Awfully stuffy carriage,’ he said.

“A scathing reply was on the tip of my tongue, when I became aware of the approach of a porter with footwarmers, and directed his attention to him.

“‘Put one in here,’ I said. ‘The further end.’

“The man did so. He paused a moment, and put another tin into the carriage, close to the open door.

“‘I suppose he thinks that you are going too,’ I remarked to Edward, as the man moved away.

“He answered rather absently. “‘Yes, I suppose so,’ he said. ‘Are you quite sure—’

“The ringing bell interrupted him, and in another moment the train was moving slowly out of the station. I arranged my possessions to my liking, tucked myself up in my rug, and took up the book with which I intended to beguile the time, looking forward to a fairly pleasant journey.

“My book was one in which I had expected to be considerably interested, and I was rather annoyed when it gradually dawned upon me that it was not absorbing my attention in the least. I hardly seemed to take in, or to care to take in, what I read, and a feeling of vague dissatisfaction, utterly objectless and unreasonable, was stealing in and poisoning my contentment.

“Certainly, the weather was disagreeable. The wind was rising as we got into the country, and it howled and shrieked about the train as it pursued its rapid way. But I am not usually affected by such influences, and it surprised me considerably to think that the contrast between the clamour outside and the dead stillness within the carriage had no power to distract me. I found myself growing actually restless at last, and I thought it was time to concentrate my attention forcibly on my book. I made myself thoroughly comfortable, turning away from the empty carriage towards the window by which I was sitting, and propping one elbow on the ledge.

“I suppose I made myself too comfortable, for I went to sleep. I woke suddenly, opening my eyes with a full consciousness of my surroundings, and, as I did so, I was amazed to think that I must have slept for some time. I was in exactly the same position as that in which I had settled myself to read, and my eyes had opened directly upon the window. The train was evidently passing through some kind of cutting, and in the window the other end of the compartment was distinctly reflected.

“It was that which the reflection showed me that made me realise how heavily I had been sleeping, for it witnessed to the fact that we must have stopped, unknown to me, at a station. The carriage as pictured in the window, was no longer occupied only by myself. In the corner seats, on either side of the other door, were reflected the figures of a man and a woman.

“I did not turn round, partly through that curious notion of courtesy which dictates the ignoring of one’s fellow travellers, partly because there was something rather interesting about the appearance of these particular people, and I was idly pleased to be able to study them by means of their reflections, without being guilty of actually staring at them.

“The corner seat obliquely facing me was occupied by the man. He was reading a newspaper, and only his forehead and the outline of his head were visible to me. He had taken off his hat, and his hair appeared to be fair and crisply curling. His figure was well made, and his pose spoke of self-possession and determination. There was, indeed, something almost excessively determined in the touch with which his hand held his paper. He was a gentleman, evidently, well appointed in every particular.

“It is difficult to account for the impression conveyed by appearance only—especially by an appearance seen merely as a reflection—but it was equally obvious to me that his companion belonged to a somewhat lower social grade.

“She was a girl of about nineteen, very tenderly and prettily made. The profile was charming; the small, delicately-cut features were full of expression. But there was a strained, painfully anxious look about them now, as she leaned forward, apparently talking eagerly to the man, and I found myself regretting that the noise of the train, and the shrieking of the wind—which had increased extraordinarily—should prevent my catching even the faintest sound of her voice. Arguing from something unusually dainty about her attire, from something essentially un-English about her face, and from the rapid and plentiful gestures with which she emphasised her speech, I settled in my own mind that she was French.

“I was watching her with a sense of growing fascination, when the conditions outside suddenly changed. The window ceased to act as a reflector. In place of the picture at which I had been looking the lights of a station flashed, and the train came to a standstill.

“The carriage had grown bitterly cold, and at the same time there was something curiously oppressive about the atmosphere. The door on my side opened on to the platform, and I sprang up—still without looking round—and let down the window with an irresistible impulse. I accounted to myself for the haste with which I had moved by looking eagerly for a porter with fresh foot warmers. No such person was visible, but nevertheless I did not draw in my head again.

“The groups of people moving to and fro had a singular attraction for me, and I stood there, at the window, in spite of the cold—which affected me less now that the window was open than it had done when it was shut—until the train began to move again. I sat down in my corner, pulled up the window, and then turned, for the first time since I had become aware of their presence, towards my fellow-travellers.

“The corner seats were vacant! They were no longer there!
“My first feeling, as I realised that I was alone, was one of blank astonishment. It is by no means usual for a train so to run into a station that passengers can get out from either side of a carriage. Moreover, not the slightest sound of their departure had reached my ears as I stood at the window. My astonishment subsided, however. I accepted the practical explanation of the matter which alone presented itself to me, and proceeded to compose myself once more to the enjoyment of my solitude.

“But for the first time in my life, solitude failed to make itself congenial to me. The brief interval of companionship—as conveyed by the contemplation and reflection of my fellow-travellers—had apparently demoralised me. A singular realisation of the isolation of my position, shut in there alone, and moving rapidly through the darkness, presented itself to me.

“The personality of those same fellow-travellers, also, had impressed me altogether unduly. It was not only that I could not forget them; I found myself dwelling on them. The girl’s face came between me and the book I was reading; the man’s callous indifference to her evident pleading oppressed me strangely. Vague sentences, the sense of which invariably eluded me as I tried to grasp them, kept floating through my mind, and I knew that I was trying to construct the drift of her words—those words of which I had not caught the faintest murmur.

“So completely possessed was I with the thought of the two that it did not strike me as being strange, when I gradually became aware of that singular feeling which everyone has experienced—the feeling that I was not alone. But I was distinctly surprised when I realised that the feeling was becoming curiously distasteful to me.

“It was absolutely still in the carriage, and, after the cheery bustle of the station, the quiet jarred on me. The beat and rumble of the train seemed to come from a long way off, shutting in the island of dead silence, of which I was the centre.

“I lifted my eyes from my book, on which they had been mechanically fixed, and looked about me. The dim lamp cast the usual depressing light over the usual accessories of a first-class carriage. Opposite me were the three empty places, divided by the regulation cushioned arms. On the side on which I sat were two more empty places. Between the two seats at the other end lay the unused footwarmer. It chimed in too aptly with my weird sense of unseen fellow-travellers, and pinching myself slightly, I turned with a sharp movement of self-contempt, to look out of the window at my side.

“I looked once more, not out into a dimly discerned landscape but into a clear-cut reflection of the carriage in which I sat. And there, reflected back with ghastly distinctness—reflected back as sitting in those seats which I had seen the instant before were empty—were my fellow-travellers.”

Miss Lanyon paused. She was looking straight before her, her hands clenched tightly round the arms of her chair. Every trace of colour had died out of her strong face, and she went on in a slow harsh voice,
“You think you know what it is to be cold. Frances,” she said. “You don’t. You had better pray that you never may! It is to feel yourself gradually losing all human sensation; to feel that where there should be glowing moving blood there is motionless ice; to feel that the very atmosphere about you is not the atmosphere of every day, warm with the breath of your fellow creatures, but something rarified until its chill is agony.

“It comes about slowly—very, very slowly. First your heart ceases to beat—dies, and grows cold within you. Then the same cold spreads, little by little, until your every limb is frozen, and you can neither move nor breathe. I have felt cold only once in my life. I felt it then. I sat in my place, spell-bound, gazing at the reflection of that which I knew possessed no actual form, and the train swayed and jarred on its rushing way through the night.

“The position of the two figures had altered slightly. The man had laid down his paper, and his face was fully visible to me. It was the handsome face of a man of about thirty-five, blasé, and sensual in expression, and with a suggestion of cruelty about its lines.

“All its worst points were evidently accentuated at the moment. The brows were heavily contracted, and the mouth was very hard. The wind had dropped, suddenly. The throbbing beat of the train went on, rapid, monotonous, unceasing. There was absolute silence in the carriage. No external sounds came between my sense of hearing and the sound of a voice. But though I saw that he was speaking, I heard nothing.

“He was speaking sharply and decisively—that I saw. The girl was listening to him, her eyes fixed on his face, one hand pressed against her heart. It was her left hand, and ungloved, and I saw that it was ringless. Almost before he stopped she had broken again into speech. She was evidently dissenting from what he had said, trembling from head to foot with the vehemence of her emotion. Demonstrating, denying, pleading, the quivering passion threatening every moment to break through the difficult restraint of her expression, she lifted one small hand with a tremulous gesture, and, pushing the hair from her forehead, looked feverishly round the carriage.

“Her face was turned towards me, and I saw her eyes. Deep and dark, half wild, and desperate, I met them fully reflected in the glass, and in the same instant my own natural life, frozen and dead within me, seemed to be replaced by another. A burning, craving desire swelled up in me. I was shaken from head to foot by such an intensity of emotion as I had never known—as was utterly foreign to my temperament. As I sat there, conscious with a ghastly double consciousness of my own rigid, spell-bound figure, I knew that my agony of mind belonged not to me, but to her—to the girl reflected in the glass before me.

“She paused at last in her rapid speech, and such a sick hunger of hope and fear rose in my heart as almost choked me, while she waited, leaning rather forward, for his answer. There was a moment’s pause. The wind shrieked and wailed, and my eyes burned in their sockets as I strained them upon the window. Then, without a word, the man took up his newspaper again.
“On the instant the girl started to her feet, tearing the newspaper from his hands, and facing him, her slender figure tense with fury. A passionate sense of intolerable wrong, of treachery and deceit, culminating in unendurable cruelty, was turning her brain to fire, and I watched, my very life seeming to beat in her frenzied, impulsive movements.

“Speaking wildly, almost incoherently, she lifted her hands to the throat of her dress, and drew out a little bit of ribbon, on which was strung a ring— a wedding ring. She dragged it off, snapping the ribbon-like cotton, and thrust the ring into its place on her finger, stretching out her left hand—the hand now of a wife—to him, as she did so, with a gesture which was superb in its agony and appeal. He did not move or speak; he was watching her with a heavy, lowering face; and as I looked from her to him I thought that if I had been free to talk or feel, I should have felt a shock of fear.

“Then, as suddenly as it had arisen, her form died away. Before I realised the change, she had fallen on her knees on the carriage floor, catching his hand in hers in such utter self-abandonment as I had never before conceived. I had heard of supplication, but I had never known what it meant until I shared the prayer which that unhappy girl raised to the man at whose feet she knelt.

“It was only for a moment. He drew his hand deliberately away, and, looking down into her upturned face, spoke one short sentence. For a moment the reflected figure of the girl knelt on there, motionless. Then she rose. She stood for an instance in silence, and then began to speak, slowly. He had driven her beyond the limits of endurance to defiance. She told him what she intended to do. I don’t know what it was—I have never known—but I felt her meaning, then, as clearly as though I had heard her words. She drew from the bosom of her dress papers which she showed him as ocular demonstration of her intention, replacing them quietly.

“As he spoke I saw his face change. I saw the lines about his mouth contract. His hand moved rapidly to his breast pocket, the bright steel of a revolver flashed in the lamplight, and as I shrieked out in insane warning, the blackness of the night passed across the reflection, and I saw no more.

“The wind moaned, the throbbing beat of the train went on and on, and I sat there paralysed, staring straight before me, with burning, starting eyes. The darkness into which they looked was awful to me—the darkness which hid horror unspeakable.

“But the dimly-lighted carriage, on the other hand, was infinitely more awful. I dared not look round. The fearful conviction with which I was penetrated, that if I did so I should see nothing, was even more hideous to me than the ghastly companionship of which I was dimly conscious. The wild emotion of the past few moments had died out utterly. No feeling but one of sick, intolerable horror was alive in me as I waited, never turning my eyes, for what I knew would come.

“Many lifetimes of frozen suspense seemed to elapse, and then, suddenly, and without warning—as the necessary external conditions recurred—the reflection was visible again.

“I had known what I should see. I had thought that I was numbed to any further sense of horror. But as my eyes rested on the dreadful stillness of that girlish figure, huddled limply on the seat—beside me, as it were—I knew that I had been mistaken. At first I saw that figure only. My head was growing giddy, and I was on the verge of losing consciousness, when a stealthy movement in the reflection shocked me back to life. The man, who had been withdrawn out of range of the reflector, came back into the picture.

“He was white to the lips, and the evil determination of his face was hideous to see. I felt myself shrink and cower in my corner as though I were trying to hide from his wicked eyes. He stood still, and drew out his watch. Stepping with a care intolerable in its ghastly significance, he passed the motionless body, and going to the window, let it down and looked out. Then he pulled it up again, and began to move about with quick decisive movements.

“He took down his Gladstone from the rack, and unstrapped a second rug. Without an instant’s pause, he lifted the heavy, inanimate form, and placed it carefully in the corner. With the same rapid, callous movements, he drew from the dead girl’s dress the papers with which she had threatened him. One rug he arranged about her so as to give the impression of a sleeping figure; the other he flung on the floor at her feet, where it looked as though it had slipped from her knees. He put on his hat, and took his bag in his hand.

“By this time I knew we were slackening speed, slackening it slowly, and with the deliberation incidental to arrival at a large station. I felt that in a moment more the reflection must cease. We were going slower and slower. I saw the man put his hand on the handle of the door, turn it, and stand waiting. I saw him jump out, and then—the lights of a station once more, and the train at a standstill.

“I was released. I knew nothing else. An insane desire to see that cruel deed avenged, to bring down justice on the doer, literally possessed me. I rushed across the carriage, flung open the door, and, clutching at the first person I saw, entreated him wildly to stop the murderer, to fetch a doctor, not to let him go. I was vaguely aware of a circle of bewildered faces about me. I heard my voice rise to a hoarse cry, and then I fainted.”

Miss Lanyon’s voice ceased abruptly, and there was an interval of dead silence. She had spoken in a low, vibrating voice, the very intense restraint of which witnessed, as no words could have done, to the strength of her feelings. Her breath was coming thick and short. The girl who had listened to her was very still; her fingers were clenched tightly together in her lap, and she was rather pale. It was Miss Lanyon who spoke first.

“That’s all,” she said. “Don’t take the trouble to comment, Frances. I know all the stock observations as to optical delusions, overstrung nerves, and dreams. Only I myself can realise the awful reality of that ghastly experience. I don’t expect to convey it to anyone else.”

“Did you ever find out—did you ever hear of any reason?” The girl’s voice was low and awestruck. The manner with which Miss Lanyon had told her story had affected even her self-assured practicality.

There was a moment’s pause, and then Miss Lanyon said, hoarsely:

“I found out, with infinite difficulty, that the dead body of a girl, shot through the heart, had been taken out of the train which reached Norwich at the same time in the evening, on the same day of the same month two years before. I heard that no clue to her identity had ever been discovered, and that her murderer had never been traced. And I heard that she had been found in the carriage occupying the same position on the train as that in which I had travelled from London—the third from the engine.”

A low inarticulate exclamation broke from the girl, and then she was silent again. She was evidently making a valiant stand against the impression made on her, when she said, with rather uncertain assurance:

“It’s a most curious story, Miss Lanyon, and I’m immensely grateful to you for telling it me. All the same, I don’t see—”

Miss Lanyon interrupted her brusquely.

“No,” she said. “But I did see. That is just the difference.”

‘Ghosts, clairvoyant visions, true presentiments, and dreams are all glimpses of the unseen,’ he said. ‘Such messages and messengers come from we know not where, and we know not how they come, but certainly they do come. Often the very act of communication appears difficult: those beyond the ken of our normal perceptions find it hard to get into touch with us, and often the messages get distorted or bungled in transit.’

‘So as to be quite trivial or meaningless,’ said someone.

‘That is so,’ said he. ‘But, again, sometimes the message seems to be rendered more convincing by the very errors it contains. Error is so likely in such a tremendous transmission. I heard a story at first-hand the other day which illustrates that very aptly.’

There was an encouraging murmur of invitation, and Hugh drew from a drawer in the writing-table a sheaf of manuscript.

‘I heard it in considerable detail,’ he said, ‘and I have only turned it into narrative form. It just happened like this.’

He sat down by the lamp, and read to us.

Woollard’s Farm lay remote and solitary in the green lap of the Romney Marsh. Not a house stood within a mile of it as a bird would travel, and the curve of the farm road following the big drainage dyke made that distance half again as long for wheeled traffic. For a foot passenger, a couple of railed plank bridges crossed the dyke, and by cutting off the curve made a directer route, but now, in mid-winter, the flood water was high and the foot-bridges awash; deep pools lay in the intervening pastures, and any who would go into Rye must make the longer circuit before he struck the high road.

The farm took its name from the family which for two hundred years, so the tombstones in the Brooklands churchyard testified, had once owned its ample acres. Today these acres were sorely dwindled, and dwindled, too, was the yeoman stock which had once more prosperously tilled it. The last proprietor of the diminishing line had begotten no son, and though one at least of his two daughters to whom he had left it had a masculine grip in her efficient management, they were both unmarried and middle-aged, and no doubt, at their death Woollard’s Farm, though it might retain its patronymic style, would pass into the hands of strangers. They knew of no other paternal relation except their Uncle Alfred, who was a town-bred man and would surely, if he survived them, sell this marsh-land property. There was more than an off-chance of this, for, twenty years younger than their father, he was but little their senior, and a gnarled, robust fellow. Often, indeed, had he urged his nieces to make the sale themselves, for houses such as theirs, with its spacious parlours, its solid oak floors and staircases, its pleasant brick-walled garden, were fetching high prices in the market. There had been several enquiries lately at his house-agent’s office in Rye for just such a property, and he promised them a fine bid for it, and himself, no doubt, a fine percentage on the transaction. He was considerably in need of some such piece of business, for times were bad and money scarce with him.

But his hectoring persuasions had hitherto failed to convince his nieces; as long as they could get a livelihood out of the place, their affection for their home was impregnable to such suggestions. As for the loneliness of it, they were self-sufficient women, neither making friends nor needing them, undesirous of chatting neighbours, and content to get through the day’s work and be ready for the next. Lately affairs had gone very well with them: market-days at Rye and New Romney had enabled Ellen Woollard to amass a fat sheaf of notes from the sale of pigs and poultry, and a wallet, with a hundred and fifty pounds in it was, on this evening of Christmas day, safely stowed in the secret cupboard in the panelling of the parlour at the farm. Next week there were substantial purchases to be made at the Ashford market, and for that reason she had not paid her notes into the County Bank at Rye. Ready money, to be paid down then and there, made the best bargaining at a market, and to deposit and draw out again from the bank meant a half-day twice occupied with the excursion.

The two sisters lived with the utmost simplicity: they kept no servant, except a girl whom they had allowed to go for two days of Christmas holiday to her family in Rye; she, with Rebecca Woollard, the younger of the sisters, did the cooking and the house-work, while Ellen was busy all day with outdoor affairs. In general, they ate and sat in the big lattice-panel kitchen, but tonight, in honour of the festival, Rebecca had made ready the parlour, and here, after their supper, when doors were locked and windows curtained, they spent the evening among the Christmas tokens of holly and evergreens with which she had decked the room. On other evenings she would be busy with sewing and household mendings, while Ellen, tired with her outdoor activities, dozed by the fire, but tonight a cheerful, talkative idleness occupied them, the sober glow of past memories, and, in spite of the shadows of middle age, optimistic gleams for the future.

‘Yes, that was a rare good sale last week at New Romney,’ said Ellen. ‘There’ll be enough and to spare for the new linen you say you want.’

Rebecca held up her thin hands to the blaze; pretty hands they were, but weak and irresolute.

‘Well, I like that!’ she said. ‘Fancy talking of the new linen I say I want! Why, there’s more patches in the tablecloth than weaving, and as for the sheets, I only ask you, Ellen, to look at them before you get into bed. Not that it’s any good to ask you to do that, for I’m sure you’re half asleep always before you turn your bedclothes down.’

‘And you’ve been sleeping better lately, Rebecca, haven’t you?’ said her sister.

‘I’ve certainly lain awake less. But such dreams as I have now all night long! They fairly scare me sometimes, and I think I’d sooner lie tossing and turning and hearing the weary clock striking than go through such adventures.’

Ellen laughed.

‘Dreams are all a pack of rubbish,’ she said, ‘fit to smile about and forget as you dress in the morning. I can dream, too, if it comes to that, for it was only last night as I thought Uncle Alfred came here with a couple of bailiffs and told us we must quit, for we couldn’t pay our taxes; we were sold up and he’d bought the place. Why, if there’s any sense in dreams, they go by the opposite. If I paid any heed to them, I should say that meant that the farm would prosper next year as it never did before. The thought of all that good money in the cupboard there was what made me dream so contrarily.’

Rebecca pursed her lips with a gloomy shake of her head.

‘I see a deal of truth in your dream, sister,’ she said. ‘Certain and sure it is that if Uncle Alfred had a chance he’d turn us out of the farm, be the means foul or fair.’

‘Maybe, but that wasn’t my dream, Rebecca. I dreamed he did turn us out, and there’s little likelihood of that with all going so well. But he’s a disagreeable man, that’s sure. Such an answer as he sent me when I asked him to take his Christmas dinner with us today, and bide over the holiday.’

‘I wonder at your asking him year after year like that,’ said Rebecca. ‘He don’t want to come, and the Lord knows we don’t want him. Would you be the happier if Uncle Alfred was sitting with us now, finding fault with this, and scolding at that, and wanting us to be quit of the farm, and go to live in some mucky town where there’s not a breath of fresh air from year’s end to year’s end, and never a fresh egg to eat, and the washing coming back all chawed up and yellow, and nothing but the gabble of neighbours all day? No, give me Uncle Alfred’s room sooner than his company, and thank you kindly.’

The mention of Uncle Alfred always made Rebecca rage; Ellen was ready to have done with the obnoxious subject.

‘Well, we won’t bother with him, nor he with us,’ she said. ‘But he’s father’s brother, Rebecca, and it is but decent to bid him spend Christmas with us. To be sure there are pleasanter things to talk about. Your house linen, now; twenty pounds you shall have to lay out on it, and any bits of things you want, and that will leave me with enough to get such pigs and hens as the farm hasn’t been stocked with for the last five years. And who knows that before the year turns out there won’t come along some bright young fellow to court you—’

This was a long-standing joke, that, like sound wine, seemed to improve with years. It set Rebecca laughing, for, indeed, she was no more of a marrying sort than her sister, and presently afterwards they made the fire safe with regard to flying sparks, and went up to the raftered bedchamber, where they slept together.

Ellen, as usual, was the first to be down next morning, and, with the girl away, she lit the kitchen fire and put the kettle to boil, while she prepared the feed for the chickens. It was very dark still, for though the sun was risen, the sky was thick with leaden clouds, moving heavily in a bitter north-east wind, and promising snow. Her face was worried and troubled; she looked sharply from time to time into the dark corners of the room and out of the latticed panes, for despite the scornful incredulity she had expressed last night on the subject of dreams, a vision so hideously and acutely real had torn her from her sleep that even now she was up and dressed and actively engaged she could not shake herself free from the horrid clutch of it.

She had dreamed that she and her sister were sitting in the parlour after nightfall on Boxing Day when a tapping came at the front door, and going to open it she had found on the threshold a soldier dressed in khaki, who begged a night’s lodging, for outside a hurricane of snow was raging, and he had lost his way. In he came, pushing by her before she had bidden him to enter, and he walked straight down the passage and into the parlour. She followed him, and already he was breaking in with the butt of his rifle the panelled door of the cupboard which contained her money. It crashed inwards beneath his blows, and he put the fat wallet of notes into his pocket. ‘Now we’ll have no witnesses,’ he cried, and next moment, with a swing of his rifle, which he held by the barrel, he had felled Rebecca with a terrific blow on the head, and there she lay bloody and battered on the floor. Then true nightmare began, for Ellen, trying to flee, found she could stir neither hand nor foot. She gave a thin, strangled cry as once more the murderous weapon was swung for the blow which she knew would crash down on her head, and with the shock of that mortal agony she awoke.

Busy herself as she might, Ellen could not shake off the convincing reality of the nightmare. It was not of dream-texture at all; it was on another plane, vivid and actual as the fire she had just lit or the bitter wind that whistled and rattled the panes. The thing had never happened, but it was of the solid stuff of reality. It was in vain that she reasoned with herself, and snapped an unconvinced finger: just here by the door she stood and saw the tall figure framed against the driving snow, and if none of this had happened, fulfilment would come to it… Then a foot on the stairs recalled her, and here was Rebecca coming down to prepare their breakfast on the morning of Boxing Day. It would never do to speak of this to her sister; it would scare her silly.

Rebecca went about her work in silence, laying the table and cutting the rashers. She had no spoken word for Ellen’s greeting, but only a mumbling movement of her lips, and her hands were a-tremble. She bent over her work, so that Ellen got no clear sight of her face, and it was not till they were seated at the table, with a candle burning there, that she got a comprehensive look at it. And what she saw made her lay down her knife and fork.

‘Goodsakes, what’s the matter, Rebecca?’ she asked.
Rebecca raised her eyes; there sat in them some nameless and abject terror.

‘Nothing,’ she said; ‘it would only make you laugh at me if I told you.’

Ellen gave her a cheerful face. ‘Well, I should like a laugh on this dark morning,’ she said. ‘One of your dreams, maybe?’

‘Yes, that’s right enough,’ said Rebecca, ‘but such a dream as I’ve never had before.’

In spite of the growing heat of the fire, it must have been still very cold in the kitchen, for suddenly, from head to foot, an icy shiver ran through Ellen.

‘Tell me then,’ she said. ‘Get rid of it.’

Rebecca caught that shudder, and violently trembling, pushed her plate from her.

‘I’ll tell you,’ she said, ‘for, sure, I can’t bear it alone. It wasn’t a dream; it wasn’t of that stuff that makes dreams… I thought it was the evening of Boxing Day, the day that’s dawned now—’

She told her dream. It was identical down to the minutest detail with Ellen’s, except that it was she herself who had gone to the door, and that she had seen her sister battered down by a blow, and waited in the catalepsy of nightmare for the stroke that would follow.

Even to Ellen’s practical and unfanciful mind, the coincidence—if coincidence it was—was overwhelming; the sanest and least fantastical could not but see in this double vision a warning that it would be foolhardy to disregard, and within an hour the two of them had locked up the house, and were in the pony-cart on the way to Rye. As it was Boxing Day, the bank would be shut, and their plan was to entrust their money to their uncle for safe keeping till tomorrow. They had agreed not to tell him the true cause of their expedition; it was reasonable enough that two women in a place so remote should not care to be keeping so large a sum in the house. Tomorrow one of them would call again and deposit it at the bank. They found him already at the whisky bottle, and acid and disagreeable as ever.

‘Well, what brings you two here?’ he said. ‘Compliments of the season, or some such rubbish?’

They explained their errand.

‘A pack of nonsense!’ said he. ‘I’ll not have aught to do with your money. Supposing my house was broken into before tomorrow morning, and your notes taken, you’d have the law on me for their recovery. And I tell you that that’s a deal more likely to happen in a town than that a thief should go trapezing half-a-dozen miles out into the marsh on the chance of finding a packet of bank-notes at a lonely farmhouse!’

He got up, beat the ashes out of his pipe, and filled it again, frowning and muttering to himself.
‘Burglars, indeed, at Woollard’s Farm,’ he said. ‘I never heard of such a crazy notion! If I had a bit of money in the house here—worse luck I haven’t—it would be a deal more reasonable of me to ask you to take care of it. Who ever heard of a burglary at a house like yours? The man would be daft who tramped halfway across the marsh, and in a snowstorm, too—for there’ll be snow before night, unless I’m much mistaken—on such a chance. Who’s to know that you’ve got the worth of a penny piece in the house?—for I warrant you’ve told nobody.’

‘Uncle Alfred, you might be kind and keep it for us,’ said Ellen. ‘It’s only till tomorrow.’

‘I might, might I?’ he sneered. ‘Well, I tell you I mightn’t, and more than that, I won’t. You’ve got safe places enough. Where do you keep it?’

‘In the panel-cupboard in the parlour,’ said Ellen.

‘Aye, and a good place, too,’ said he. ‘I remember that cupboard; your father always kept his brass there. And do you figure a burglar smashing in all your panelling in hopes of finding a cupboard there, and when he’s hit on that, thinking to discover a wallet with bank-notes in it? A couple of dreamy, timorous women—that’s what you are. I wouldn’t keep your money in my house, not if you paid me ten per cent. of it for my trouble. Where should I be if it got stolen? Be off with you both, and don’t bother me with your Christmas invitations!’

It was no manner of good to spend time and persuasions on the crusty fellow, and there was no one else whom they knew sufficiently well to approach on so unusual an errand. By midday the two were back again at the farm, glad to be indoors on this morning of shrewd snowy blasts, and the money, since assuredly there was no better hiding place than this concealed cupboard in the panelling, was back once more in the caché. Sullen and snarling as Uncle Alfred had been, there was certainly good sense in his view that this remote homestead was about the unlikeliest possible place for a burglar to choose for his operations, and Ellen, with more success than in the cold dawn, could reason herself out of her alarm. A dream was no more than a dream when all was said and done, and it was not for a sensible woman to heed such things. It was singular to be sure that the same vision had torn Rebecca from her sleep, but tomorrow by this time she would be laughing at the fears which had sent her twittering into Rye this morning.

Before the close of the short winter day the snow had begun to fall in earnest, and by the time the chickens and pigs were fed and made secure, and the thick curtains drawn, they could hear the thick insistent flurry of it as the wind drove it against the panes. But now that doors were locked and windows bolted, the squeal of the tempest shrill above the soft tapping of the snow-flakes only intensified the comfort of the swept hearth and the log fire that glowed in the open grate. Once again, as last night, they sat in the parlour, with the dark panelled walls gleaming sombrely in the firelight and the flames leaping as the wind bugled in the chimney. Eight o’clock, and nine, and ten sounded on the chimes of the grandfather clock, and as the last hour struck Ellen got up. The tranquil passage of the evening had quite restored the grip of her common sense, and she could even joke about her vanished apprehensions.
‘Well, I reckon it’s no use our sitting up for that soldier of yours, Rebecca,’ she said. ‘He’s missed his connection, you might say, and I shall be off to bed, for tomorrow’s a work-day again—’

Her sentence hung suspended and unfinished.

There came a rap at the front door at the end of the passage, and the bell tingled. Rebecca rose to her feet with hands up to her ears, as if to shut out the sound.

‘Who can it be at this time of night?’ whispered Ellen.

Rebecca came close to her, white and palsied with fear.

‘It’s he,’ she said. ‘I know it’s he. We must keep still, for there’s no light showing, and perhaps he may go away. Dear God, let him go!’

A rattling at the latch had succeeded the knocking, and then all was quiet. Presently it began again, and again the bell repeated its summons.

Then Ellen lit a hand-lamp; anything was better than this unbearable suspense; besides if their visitor was some strayed wayfarer—

‘I’m going to the door,’ she said. ‘It may be someone who has lost his way in the snow and the darkness, and on such a night he might well perish of cold before he found shelter. What should you and I feel, Rebecca, if tomorrow a woman, or a girl maybe, was found stiff and stark nigh the house, or drowned in the big dyke? That would be worse stuff than any dream.’

Trembling with fright but with unshakeable courage, and disregarding her sister’s appeals, she went straight to the front door, drew back the heavy bolts, and opened it. On the threshold, framed against the fast-falling snow, stood a man in khaki. In the flickering light from her lamp she could not distinctly see his face, but over his shoulder was a rifle, of which he grasped the butt.

‘I’m lost in the marsh, ma’am,’ he said, ‘trying for a short cut to Rye, but I knew there was a farm
hereabouts, and thank God I’ve found it. I ask you for a lodging till dawn, for on a night like this there’s death out there.’

‘I can give you no lodging,’ she said shortly. ‘Follow the farm-road and you’ll strike the highway.’

‘But there’s no seeing your hand before your face,’ he said, ‘and I’m half perished with cold already. Any outhouse will do for me, just shelter and a wisp of straw to wrap me in.’

The strangle of her nightmare was on her. Rebecca had crept along the passage, and in her ashen face Ellen saw her own heart mirrored.
‘You can get no lodging here,’ she said. ‘Them as walk at night must get tramping.’

For answer he held out his rifle to her.

‘Here, take that, ma’am,’ he said. ‘You’re scared of me, I can see, but if I meant you harm would I give you my gun? I’ll take off my boots, too, and my belt with its bayonet; a footsore man without boots or weapons can’t harm you, and you may lock me into any cupboard or shed you please.’

His hands and face were bleached with the cold, and dream or no dream, she could not shut a man out in the cold of this impenetrable night.

‘Come in,’ she said. ‘Take off your boots, and get you into the kitchen. Come what may, it’s sheer death tonight in the marsh.’

At her bidding he walked into the kitchen while she had a whispered word with Rebecca.

‘We can’t do different, Rebecca,’ she said, ‘though strange it is about your dream and mine, and if it’s God’s will we be clubbed to death, it’s His will. But what’s not His will is that we should let a man die on our doorstep because we were afraid. Why should he give me his gun, besides, if he meant ill to us? So now I’ll give him his bite of supper, for he’s clemmed with cold and hunger, and then lock him into the kitchen. Meantime you take the money from the cupboard and hide it between your mattresses or mine. Why that’s the finish of our dreaming already if you do that, for by the dream it should be from the cupboard in the parlour that he took it.’

Indeed, she needed heartening herself, so strangely had their dream found fulfilment, but taking hold on her courage, she walked into the kitchen, while Rebecca went upstairs. But she could not bear to remain solitary there, and she came back and helped her sister to get a bite of supper for the man.

The food and warmth revived him, and presently, leaving him stretched on two chairs in front of the drowsy fire, they turned the key of the kitchen door on him and went to their room.

Neither of them undressed, but with locked doors and light burning they lay on their beds to pass the vigil till day. The wind had fallen by midnight, the driven snow no longer pattered on the panes, and the stillness sang in their ears. Ellen’s bed was nearest to the window, and presently after she sat up to listen more intently, without alarming her sister, to a noise that ever so faintly overscored the silence. There it was again; someone was rattling the sash of the window immediately below, the window of the passage along the front of the house which led to the kitchen. Rebecca heard also, and like a ghost she slid across to her sister’s bed.

‘There’s someone outside,’ she whispered. ‘That’s his fellow, Ellen; there are two of them now, one within and the other outside. He’ll go round to the kitchen presently, and the man we left there will let him in. Sister, why did you suffer him to come in? We’re done for now; ah, we’re done for, and naught can save us!’

Ellen’s heart sank. The interpretation seemed only too terribly probable. She drew her sister towards her and kissed her.

‘You must try to forgive me, Rebecca,’ she said, ‘if I’ve brought your death upon you. But God knows I couldn’t do different if I hoped for salvation. It’s the money they’ve come for, and the dream is true. Ah, where is it? Give it to me, and I’ll go down to the fellow in the kitchen and offer it to him, and swear to let him go scot free if he’ll only take it and spare our lives. We’ll lay no information to identify him; we’ll let it be known we’ve just been robbed, and there’s the end of it. And yet, why did he give me his rifle and off with his boots? That was a strange thing for him to do.’

Rebecca sat huddled on the bed. ‘Strange or no,’ she said, ‘it’s all over with us. There’s no help nor succour for us.’

She was half distraught with terror; there was no reasoning with, and Ellen, leaving the rifle she had brought upstairs with her sister, took the wallet containing the notes in her hand and went forth on her midnight and unconjecturable errand. At the bottom of the stairs she must pass the window where they had heard the stir of movement, and now outside there was the grating and grinding of some tool against the glass, and she guessed that whoever was outside was cutting the pane.

She unlocked the kitchen door and entered. The man she had fed and sheltered was awake and standing on his feet. There she was quite defenceless, with her money in her hand, and yet he did not close with her nor push her to get into touch with his accomplice. Instead he came close to her and whispered:

‘There’s someone moving outside and round about the house,’ he said. ‘A while ago he was at the kitchen window here. I couldn’t come to you and warn you, for you had locked me in.’

She held out the wallet.

‘I know the manner of man you are,’ she said. ‘You came to rob and murder us, and that’s your confederate outside. A strange warning came to us, but out of compassion I didn’t heed it. Here, then, is the money; spare our lives, and take it and begone, for that was your plan, and I swear we’ll not set the police on you.’

He looked at her narrowly.

‘What are you telling of?’ he said. ‘I’m neither robber nor murderer. But waste no more time, ma’am; there’s someone at the window now, and he’s after no good. He’d have knocked at the door if he’d been a lost wayfarer like me. Now I’m here to help you, for you took me in, and we’ll catch him. Where’s my rifle?’

For one moment, at the thought of restoring that to him nightmare clutched her again, and she envisaged Rebecca clubbed to death, with herself to follow. But then some ray of hope gleamed in her, some confidence born out of his speech and his mien.

‘I’ll fetch it for you,’ she said. She went swiftly upstairs and returned with it, and together they stood by the curtained window, while Rebecca nursed a candle on the stairs to give a glimmer of light. He had picked up his belt with his bayonet, and now, as they waited, he fitted it into its catch and drew on his boots. There he was, now armed again, and she defenceless, and in silence they waited.

Presently the scratching at the pane outside ceased, and a current of cold air poured in, making
the curtain belly in the draught. It was clear that the burglar had detached a pane of glass and withdrawn it. Then the curtains were thrust aside from without, and a hand entered, feeling for the catch of the window. At that her companion laid down his rifle, and took a step forward, and seized it by the wrist. But it slipped from him, and snatching up his rifle, he ran to the door, and unbolted and opened it.

‘We’ll catch him yet though,’ he called to her. ‘Lock the door after me, and let none in unless you hear my voice,’ and he vanished into the snowflecked blackness of the night.

Rebecca came down to her, and together they went into the kitchen to wait for what might come out of the night to them. It was no longer possible to doubt the good faith of their visitor, for there on the table lay the wallet with the money untouched. Presently they heard a knock at the door, and his voice calling to them to open. The snow shrouded him in white, and for the second time the soldier of their dream stood on the threshold.

‘There was no finding him,’ he said, ‘for it’s dark as the pit, and the snow is like a solid thing. Once I heard him close, and I called on him to stop else I would run my bayonet through him. Not a word did I get, and I thrust at the noise of his running and there was a squeal as the point pierced something, but he shook free again and I heard no more of him. I took him in the arm I reckon. Let’s see what the steel can tell us.’

The bayonet confirmed this impression; in the scooped sides of it were runnels of melted snow red with the deeper dye of the blood which for not more than an inch covered the point of it. A flesh wound probably had been inflicted, which had not prevented him from making his escape. With that, there was no more to be done that night, and soon the two sisters were back in their room again, and their guest, with the kitchen door locked no longer, lay down to sleep again. Tomorrow, if no more snow fell, they might perhaps trace and identify the fugitive.

All three were early astir next morning. The snow had ceased and a frosty sun gleamed on the whiteness of the fields. While they were at breakfast the servant-girl, returning from her holiday, came running into the kitchen, breathless and wide-eyed with excitement and alarm.

‘There’s something in the great dyke, mistress,’ she said. ‘It’s like the body of a man caught among the reeds below the foot-bridge.’

They ran out, and it was easy to follow certain half-obliterated tracks in the frozen snow that led from under the window in the passage to the edge of the dyke. From there, in the deep water by the half-submerged foot-bridge the body had drifted but a few yards into the shallows by the reed-bed, where, with head-downwards, it had been caught and anchored. A couple of long poles soon towed it to the shore, and turning it over, his nieces looked on the face of Alfred Woollard. His coat-sleeve was torn just below the right shoulder, and the ragged edges were stained with blood.

She was elderly, tall, and harshly thin, with a hard colourlessness of face. She spoke not with acrimony, but with grave severity. Rebecca Ann Glynn, younger, stouter and rosy of face between her crinkling puffs of gray hair, gasped, by way of assent. She sat in a wide flounce of black silk in the corner of the sofa, and rolled terrified eyes from her sister Caroline to her sister Mrs. Stephen Brigham, who had been Emma Glynn, the one beauty of the family. She was beautiful still, with a large, splendid, full-blown beauty; she filled a great rocking-chair with her superb bulk of femininity, and swayed gently back and forth, her black silks whispering and her black frills fluttering. Even the shock of death (for her brother Edward lay dead in the house,) could not disturb her outward serenity of demeanour. She was grieved over the loss of her brother: he had been the youngest, and she had been fond of him, but never had Emma Brigham lost sight of her own importance amidst the waters of tribulation. She was always awake to the consciousness of her own stability in the midst of vicissitudes and the splendour of her permanent bearing.

But even her expression of masterly placidity changed before her sister Caroline’s announcement and her sister Rebecca Ann’s gasp of terror and distress in response.

“I think Henry might have controlled his temper, when poor Edward was so near his end,” said she with an asperity which disturbed slightly the roseate curves of her beautiful mouth.

“Of course he did not KNOW,” murmured Rebecca Ann in a faint tone strangely out of keeping with her appearance.

One involuntarily looked again to be sure that such a feeble pipe came from that full-swelling chest.

“Of course he did not know it,” said Caroline quickly. She turned on her sister with a strange sharp look of suspicion. “How could he have known it?” said she. Then she shrank as if from the other’s possible answer. “Of course you and I both know he could not,” said she conclusively, but her pale face was paler than it had been before.

Rebecca gasped again. The married sister, Mrs. Emma Brigham, was now sitting up straight in her chair; she had ceased rocking, and was eyeing them both intently with a sudden accentuation of family likeness in her face. Given one common intensity of emotion and similar lines showed forth, and the three sisters of one race were evident.

“What do you mean?” said she impartially to them both. Then she, too, seemed to shrink before a possible answer. She even laughed an evasive sort of laugh. “I guess you don’t mean anything,” said she, but her face wore still the expression of shrinking horror.

“Nobody means anything,” said Caroline firmly. She rose and crossed the room toward the door with grim decisiveness.

“Where are you going?” asked Mrs. Brigham.

“I have something to see to,” replied Caroline, and the others at once knew by her tone that she had some solemn and sad duty to perform in the chamber of death.

“Oh,” said Mrs. Brigham.

After the door had closed behind Caroline, she turned to Rebecca.

“Did Henry have many words with him?” she asked.

“They were talking very loud,” replied Rebecca evasively, yet with an answering gleam of ready response to the other’s curiosity in the quick lift of her soft blue eyes.

Mrs. Brigham looked at her. She had not resumed rocking. She still sat up straight with a slight knitting of intensity on her fair forehead, between the pretty rippling curves of her auburn hair.

“Did you—hear anything?” she asked in a low voice with a glance toward the door.

“I was just across the hall in the south parlour, and that door was open and this door ajar,” replied Rebecca with a slight flush.

“Then you must have—”

“I couldn’t help it.”

“Everything?”

“Most of it.”

“What was it?”

“The old story.”

“I suppose Henry was mad, as he always was, because Edward was living on here for nothing, when he had wasted all the money father left him.”

Rebecca nodded with a fearful glance at the door.

When Emma spoke again her voice was still more hushed. “I know how he felt,” said she. “He had always been so prudent himself, and worked hard at his profession, and there Edward had never done anything but spend, and it must have looked to him as if Edward was living at his expense, but he wasn’t.”

“No, he wasn’t.”

“It was the way father left the property—that all the children should have a home here—and he left money enough to buy the food and all if we had all come home.”

“Yes.”

“And Edward had a right here according to the terms of father’s will, and Henry ought to have remembered it.”

“Yes, he ought.”

“Did he say hard things?”

“Pretty hard from what I heard.”

“What?”

“I heard him tell Edward that he had no business here at all, and he thought he had better go away.”

“What did Edward say?”

“That he would stay here as long as he lived and afterward, too, if he was a mind to, and he would like to see Henry get him out; and then—”

“What?”

“Then he laughed.”

“What did Henry say.”

“I didn’t hear him say anything, but—”

“But what?”

“I saw him when he came out of this room.”

“He looked mad?”

“You’ve seen him when he looked so.”

Emma nodded; the expression of horror on her face had deepened.

“Do you remember that time he killed the cat because she had scratched him?”

“Yes. Don’t!”

Then Caroline reentered the room. She went up to the stove in which a wood fire was burning—it was a cold, gloomy day of fall—and she warmed her hands, which were reddened from recent washing in cold water.

Mrs. Brigham looked at her and hesitated. She glanced at the door, which was still ajar, as it did not easily shut, being still swollen with the damp weather of the summer. She rose and pushed it together with a sharp thud which jarred the house. Rebecca started painfully with a half exclamation. Caroline looked at her disapprovingly.

“It is time you controlled your nerves, Rebecca,” said she.

“I can’t help it,” replied Rebecca with almost a wail. “I am nervous. There’s enough to make me so, the Lord knows.”

“What do you mean by that?” asked Caroline with her old air of sharp suspicion, and something between challenge and dread of its being met.

Rebecca shrank.

“Nothing,” said she.

“Then I wouldn’t keep speaking in such a fashion.”

Emma, returning from the closed door, said imperiously that it ought to be fixed, it shut so hard.

“It will shrink enough after we have had the fire a few days,” replied Caroline. “If anything is done to it it will be too small; there will be a crack at the sill.”

“I think Henry ought to be ashamed of himself for talking as he did to Edward,” said Mrs. Brigham abruptly, but in an almost inaudible voice.

“Hush!” said Caroline, with a glance of actual fear at the closed door.

“Nobody can hear with the door shut.”

“He must have heard it shut, and—”

“Well, I can say what I want to before he comes down, and I am not afraid of him.”

“I don’t know who is afraid of him! What reason is there for anybody to be afraid of Henry?” demanded Caroline.

Mrs. Brigham trembled before her sister’s look. Rebecca gasped again. “There isn’t any reason, of course. Why should there be?”

“I wouldn’t speak so, then. Somebody might overhear you and think it was queer. Miranda Joy is in the south parlour sewing, you know.”

“I thought she went upstairs to stitch on the machine.”

“She did, but she has come down again.”

“Well, she can’t hear.”

“I say again I think Henry ought to be ashamed of himself. I shouldn’t think he’d ever get over it, having words with poor Edward the very night before he died. Edward was enough sight better disposition than Henry, with all his faults. I always thought a great deal of poor Edward, myself.”

Mrs. Brigham passed a large fluff of handkerchief across her eyes; Rebecca sobbed outright.

“Rebecca,” said Caroline admonishingly, keeping her mouth stiff and swallowing determinately.

“I never heard him speak a cross word, unless he spoke cross to Henry that last night. I don’t know, but he did from what Rebecca overheard,” said Emma.

“Not so much cross as sort of soft, and sweet, and aggravating,” sniffled Rebecca.

“He never raised his voice,” said Caroline; “but he had his way.”

“He had a right to in this case.”

“Yes, he did.”

“He had as much of a right here as Henry,” sobbed Rebecca, “and now he’s gone, and he will never be in this home that poor father left him and the rest of us again.”

“What do you really think ailed Edward?” asked Emma in hardly more than a whisper. She did not look at her sister.

Caroline sat down in a nearby armchair, and clutched the arms convulsively until her thin knuckles whitened.

“I told you,” said she.

Rebecca held her handkerchief over her mouth, and looked at them above it with terrified, streaming eyes.

“I know you said that he had terrible pains in his stomach, and had spasms, but what do you think made him have them?”

“Henry called it gastric trouble. You know Edward has always had dyspepsia.”

Mrs. Brigham hesitated a moment. “Was there any talk of an—examination?” said she.

Then Caroline turned on her fiercely.

“No,” said she in a terrible voice. “No.”

The three sisters’ souls seemed to meet on one common ground of terrified understanding through their eyes. The old-fashioned latch of the door was heard to rattle, and a push from without made the door shake ineffectually. “It’s Henry,” Rebecca sighed rather than whispered. Mrs. Brigham settled herself after a noiseless rush across the floor into her rocking-chair again, and was swaying back and forth with her head comfortably leaning back, when the door at last yielded and Henry Glynn entered. He cast a covertly sharp, comprehensive glance at Mrs. Brigham with her elaborate calm; at Rebecca quietly huddled in the corner of the sofa with her handkerchief to her face and only one small reddened ear as attentive as a dog’s uncovered and revealing her alertness for his presence; at Caroline sitting with a strained composure in her armchair by the stove. She met his eyes quite firmly with a look of inscrutable fear, and defiance of the fear and of him.

Henry Glynn looked more like this sister than the others. Both had the same hard delicacy of form and feature, both were tall and almost emaciated, both had a sparse growth of gray blond hair far back from high intellectual foreheads, both had an almost noble aquilinity of feature. They confronted each other with the pitiless immovability of two statues in whose marble lineaments emotions were fixed for all eternity.

Then Henry Glynn smiled and the smile transformed his face. He looked suddenly years younger, and an almost boyish recklessness and irresolution appeared in his face. He flung himself into a chair with a gesture which was bewildering from its incongruity with his general appearance. He leaned his head back, flung one leg over the other, and looked laughingly at Mrs. Brigham.

“I declare, Emma, you grow younger every year,” he said.

She flushed a little, and her placid mouth widened at the corners. She was susceptible to praise.

“Our thoughts to-day ought to belong to the one of us who will NEVER grow older,” said Caroline in a hard voice.

Henry looked at her, still smiling. “Of course, we none of us forget that,” said he, in a deep, gentle voice, “but we have to speak to the living, Caroline, and I have not seen Emma for a long time, and the living are as dear as the dead.”

“Not to me,” said Caroline.

She rose, and went abruptly out of the room again. Rebecca also rose and hurried after her, sobbing loudly.

Henry looked slowly after them.

“Caroline is completely unstrung,” said he. Mrs. Brigham rocked. A confidence in him inspired by his manner was stealing over her. Out of that confidence she spoke quite easily and naturally.

“His death was very sudden,” said she.

Henry’s eyelids quivered slightly but his gaze was unswerving.

“Yes,” said he; “it was very sudden. He was sick only a few hours.”

“What did you call it?”

“Gastric.”

“You did not think of an examination?”

“There was no need. I am perfectly certain as to the cause of his death.”

Suddenly Mrs. Brigham felt a creep as of some live horror over her very soul. Her flesh prickled with cold, before an inflection of his voice. She rose, tottering on weak knees.

“Where are you going?” asked Henry in a strange, breathless voice.

Mrs. Brigham said something incoherent about some sewing which she had to do, some black for the funeral, and was out of the room. She went up to the front chamber which she occupied. Caroline was there. She went close to her and took her hands, and the two sisters looked at each other.

“Don’t speak, don’t, I won’t have it!” said Caroline finally in an awful whisper.

“I won’t,” replied Emma.

That afternoon the three sisters were in the study, the large front room on the ground floor across the hall from the south parlour, when the dusk deepened.

Mrs. Brigham was hemming some black material. She sat close to the west window for the waning light. At last she laid her work on her lap.

“It’s no use, I cannot see to sew another stitch until we have a light,” said she.

Caroline, who was writing some letters at the table, turned to Rebecca, in her usual place on the sofa.

“Rebecca, you had better get a lamp,” she said.

Rebecca started up; even in the dusk her face showed her agitation.

“It doesn’t seem to me that we need a lamp quite yet,” she said in a piteous, pleading voice like a child’s.

“Yes, we do,” returned Mrs. Brigham peremptorily. “We must have a light. I must finish this to-night or I can’t go to the funeral, and I can’t see to sew another stitch.”

“Caroline can see to write letters, and she is farther from the window than you are,” said Rebecca.

“Are you trying to save kerosene or are you lazy, Rebecca Glynn?” cried Mrs. Brigham. “I can go and get the light myself, but I have this work all in my lap.”

Caroline’s pen stopped scratching.

“Rebecca, we must have the light,” said she.

“Had we better have it in here?” asked Rebecca weakly.

“Of course! Why not?” cried Caroline sternly.

“I am sure I don’t want to take my sewing into the other room, when it is all cleaned up for to-morrow,” said Mrs. Brigham.

“Why, I never heard such a to-do about lighting a lamp.”

Rebecca rose and left the room. Presently she entered with a lamp—a large one with a white porcelain shade. She set it on a table, an old-fashioned card-table which was placed against the opposite wall from the window. That wall was clear of bookcases and books, which were only on three sides of the room. That opposite wall was taken up with three doors, the one small space being occupied by the table. Above the table on the old-fashioned paper, of a white satin gloss, traversed by an indeterminate green scroll, hung quite high a small gilt and black-framed ivory miniature taken in her girlhood of the mother of the family. When the lamp was set on the table beneath it, the tiny pretty face painted on the ivory seemed to gleam out with a look of intelligence.

“What have you put that lamp over there for?” asked Mrs. Brigham, with more of impatience than her voice usually revealed. “Why didn’t you set it in the hall and have done with it. Neither Caroline nor I can see if it is on that table.”

“I thought perhaps you would move,” replied Rebecca hoarsely.

“If I do move, we can’t both sit at that table. Caroline has her paper all spread around. Why don’t you set the lamp on the study table in the middle of the room, then we can both see?”

Rebecca hesitated. Her face was very pale. She looked with an appeal that was fairly agonizing at her sister Caroline.

“Why don’t you put the lamp on this table, as she says?” asked Caroline, almost fiercely. “Why do you act so, Rebecca?”

“I should think you WOULD ask her that,” said Mrs. Brigham. “She doesn’t act like herself at all.”

Rebecca took the lamp and set it on the table in the middle of the room without another word. Then she turned her back upon it quickly and seated herself on the sofa, and placed a hand over her eyes as if to shade them, and remained so.

“Does the light hurt your eyes, and is that the reason why you didn’t want the lamp?” asked Mrs. Brigham kindly.

“I always like to sit in the dark,” replied Rebecca chokingly. Then she snatched her handkerchief hastily from her pocket and began to weep. Caroline continued to write, Mrs. Brigham to sew.

Suddenly Mrs. Brigham as she sewed glanced at the opposite wall. The glance became a steady stare. She looked intently, her work suspended in her hands. Then she looked away again and took a few more stitches, then she looked again, and again turned to her task. At last she laid her work in her lap and stared concentratedly. She looked from the wall around the room, taking note of the various objects; she looked at the wall long and intently. Then she turned to her sisters.

“What IS that?” said she.

“What?” asked Caroline harshly; her pen scratched loudly across the paper.

Rebecca gave one of her convulsive gasps.

“That strange shadow on the wall,” replied Mrs. Brigham.

Rebecca sat with her face hidden: Caroline dipped her pen in the inkstand.

“Why don’t you turn around and look?” asked Mrs. Brigham in a wondering and somewhat aggrieved way.

“I am in a hurry to finish this letter, if Mrs. Wilson Ebbit is going to get word in time to come to the funeral,” replied Caroline shortly.

Mrs. Brigham rose, her work slipping to the floor, and she began walking around the room, moving various articles of furniture, with her eyes on the shadow.

Then suddenly she shrieked out:

“Look at this awful shadow! What is it? Caroline, look, look! Rebecca, look! WHAT IS IT?”

All Mrs. Brigham’s triumphant placidity was gone. Her handsome face was livid with horror. She stood stiffly pointing at the shadow.

“Look!” said she, pointing her finger at it. “Look! What is it?”

Then Rebecca burst out in a wild wail after a shuddering glance at the wall:

“Oh, Caroline, there it is again! There it is again!”

“Caroline Glynn, you look!” said Mrs. Brigham. “Look! What is that dreadful shadow?”

Caroline rose, turned, and stood confronting the wall.

“How should I know?” she said.

“It has been there every night since he died,” cried Rebecca.

“Every night?”

“Yes. He died Thursday and this is Saturday; that makes three nights,” said Caroline rigidly. She stood as if holding herself calm with a vise of concentrated will.

“It—it looks like—like—” stammered Mrs. Brigham in a tone of intense horror.

“I know what it looks like well enough,” said Caroline. “I’ve got eyes in my head.”

“It looks like Edward,” burst out Rebecca in a sort of frenzy of fear. “Only—”

“Yes, it does,” assented Mrs. Brigham, whose horror-stricken tone matched her sister’s, “only— Oh, it is awful! What is it, Caroline?”

“I ask you again, how should I know?” replied Caroline. “I see it there like you. How should I know any more than you?”

“It MUST be something in the room,” said Mrs. Brigham, staring wildly around.

“We moved everything in the room the first night it came,” said Rebecca; “it is not anything in the room.”

Caroline turned upon her with a sort of fury. “Of course it is something in the room,” said she. “How you act! What do you mean by talking so? Of course it is something in the room.”

“Of course, it is,” agreed Mrs. Brigham, looking at Caroline suspiciously. “Of course it must be. It is only a coincidence. It just happens so. Perhaps it is that fold of the window curtain that makes it. It must be something in the room.”

“It is not anything in the room,” repeated Rebecca with obstinate horror.

The door opened suddenly and Henry Glynn entered. He began to speak, then his eyes followed the direction of the others’. He stood stock still staring at the shadow on the wall. It was life size and stretched across the white parallelogram of a door, half across the wall space on which the picture hung.

“What is that?” he demanded in a strange voice.

“It must be due to something in the room,” Mrs. Brigham said faintly.

“It is not due to anything in the room,” said Rebecca again with the shrill insistency of terror.

“How you act, Rebecca Glynn,” said Caroline.

Henry Glynn stood and stared a moment longer. His face showed a gamut of emotions—horror, conviction, then furious incredulity. Suddenly he began hastening hither and thither about the room. He moved the furniture with fierce jerks, turning ever to see the effect upon the shadow on the wall. Not a line of its terrible outlines wavered.

“It must be something in the room!” he declared in a voice which seemed to snap like a lash.

His face changed. The inmost secrecy of his nature seemed evident until one almost lost sight of his lineaments. Rebecca stood close to her sofa, regarding him with woeful, fascinated eyes. Mrs. Brigham clutched Caroline’s hand. They both stood in a corner out of his way. For a few moments he raged about the room like a caged wild animal. He moved every piece of furniture; when the moving of a piece did not affect the shadow, he flung it to the floor, the sisters watching.

Then suddenly he desisted. He laughed and began straightening the furniture which he had flung down.

“What an absurdity,” he said easily. “Such a to-do about a shadow.”

“That’s so,” assented Mrs. Brigham, in a scared voice which she tried to make natural. As she spoke she lifted a chair near her.

“I think you have broken the chair that Edward was so fond of,” said Caroline.

Terror and wrath were struggling for expression on her face. Her mouth was set, her eyes shrinking. Henry lifted the chair with a show of anxiety.

“Just as good as ever,” he said pleasantly. He laughed again, looking at his sisters. “Did I scare you?” he said. “I should think you might be used to me by this time. You know my way of wanting to leap to the bottom of a mystery, and that shadow does look—queer, like—and I thought if there was any way of accounting for it I would like to without any delay.”

“You don’t seem to have succeeded,” remarked Caroline dryly, with a slight glance at the wall.

Henry’s eyes followed hers and he quivered perceptibly.

“Oh, there is no accounting for shadows,” he said, and he laughed again. “A man is a fool to try to account for shadows.”

Then the supper bell rang, and they all left the room, but Henry kept his back to the wall, as did, indeed, the others.

Mrs. Brigham pressed close to Caroline as she crossed the hall. “He looked like a demon!” she breathed in her ear.

Henry led the way with an alert motion like a boy; Rebecca brought up the rear; she could scarcely walk, her knees trembled so.

“I can’t sit in that room again this evening,” she whispered to Caroline after supper.

“Very well, we will sit in the south room,” replied Caroline. “I think we will sit in the south parlour,” she said aloud; “it isn’t as damp as the study, and I have a cold.”

So they all sat in the south room with their sewing. Henry read the newspaper, his chair drawn close to the lamp on the table. About nine o’clock he rose abruptly and crossed the hall to the study. The three sisters looked at one another. Mrs. Brigham rose, folded her rustling skirts compactly around her, and began tiptoeing toward the door.

“What are you going to do?” inquired Rebecca agitatedly.

“I am going to see what he is about,” replied Mrs. Brigham cautiously.

She pointed as she spoke to the study door across the hall; it was ajar. Henry had striven to pull it together behind him, but it had somehow swollen beyond the limit with curious speed. It was still ajar and a streak of light showed from top to bottom. The hall lamp was not lit.

“You had better stay where you are,” said Caroline with guarded sharpness.

“I am going to see,” repeated Mrs. Brigham firmly.

Then she folded her skirts so tightly that her bulk with its swelling curves was revealed in a black silk sheath, and she went with a slow toddle across the hall to the study door. She stood there, her eye at the crack.

In the south room Rebecca stopped sewing and sat watching with dilated eyes. Caroline sewed steadily. What Mrs. Brigham, standing at the crack in the study door, saw was this:

Henry Glynn, evidently reasoning that the source of the strange shadow must be between the table on which the lamp stood and the wall, was making systematic passes and thrusts all over and through the intervening space with an old sword which had belonged to his father. Not an inch was left unpierced. He seemed to have divided the space into mathematical sections. He brandished the sword with a sort of cold fury and calculation; the blade gave out flashes of light, the shadow remained unmoved. Mrs. Brigham, watching, felt herself cold with horror.

Finally Henry ceased and stood with the sword in hand and raised as if to strike, surveying the shadow on the wall threateningly. Mrs. Brigham toddled back across the hall and shut the south room door behind her before she related what she had seen.

“He looked like a demon!” she said again. “Have you got any of that old wine in the house, Caroline? I don’t feel as if I could stand much more.”

Indeed, she looked overcome. Her handsome placid face was worn and strained and pale.

“Yes, there’s plenty,” said Caroline; “you can have some when you go to bed.”

“I think we had all better take some,” said Mrs. Brigham. “Oh, my God, Caroline, what—”

“Don’t ask and don’t speak,” said Caroline.

“No, I am not going to,” replied Mrs. Brigham; “but—”

Rebecca moaned aloud.

“What are you doing that for?” asked Caroline harshly.

“Poor Edward,” returned Rebecca.

“That is all you have to groan for,” said Caroline. “There is nothing else.”

“I am going to bed,” said Mrs. Brigham. “I sha’n’t be able to be at the funeral if I don’t.”

Soon the three sisters went to their chambers and the south parlour was deserted. Caroline called to Henry in the study to put out the light before he came upstairs. They had been gone about an hour when he came into the room bringing the lamp which had stood in the study. He set it on the table and waited a few minutes, pacing up and down. His face was terrible, his fair complexion showed livid; his blue eyes seemed dark blanks of awful reflections.

Then he took the lamp up and returned to the library. He set the lamp on the centre table, and the shadow sprang out on the wall. Again he studied the furniture and moved it about, but deliberately, with none of his former frenzy. Nothing affected the shadow. Then he returned to the south room with the lamp and again waited. Again he returned to the study and placed the lamp on the table, and the shadow sprang out upon the wall. It was midnight before he went upstairs. Mrs. Brigham and the other sisters, who could not sleep, heard him.

The next day was the funeral. That evening the family sat in the south room. Some relatives were with them. Nobody entered the study until Henry carried a lamp in there after the others had retired for the night. He saw again the shadow on the wall leap to an awful life before the light.

The next morning at breakfast Henry Glynn announced that he had to go to the city for three days. The sisters looked at him with surprise. He very seldom left home, and just now his practice had been neglected on account of Edward’s death. He was a physician.

“How can you leave your patients now?” asked Mrs. Brigham wonderingly.

“I don’t know how to, but there is no other way,” replied Henry easily. “I have had a telegram from Doctor Mitford.”

“Consultation?” inquired Mrs. Brigham.

“I have business,” replied Henry.

Doctor Mitford was an old classmate of his who lived in a neighbouring city and who occasionally called upon him in the case of a consultation.

After he had gone Mrs. Brigham said to Caroline that after all Henry had not said that he was going to consult with Doctor Mitford, and she thought it very strange.

“Everything is very strange,” said Rebecca with a shudder.

“What do you mean?” inquired Caroline sharply.

“Nothing,” replied Rebecca.

Nobody entered the library that day, nor the next, nor the next. The third day Henry was expected home, but he did not arrive and the last train from the city had come.

“I call it pretty queer work,” said Mrs. Brigham. “The idea of a doctor leaving his patients for three days anyhow, at such a time as this, and I know he has some very sick ones; he said so. And the idea of a consultation lasting three days! There is no sense in it, and NOW he has not come. I don’t understand it, for my part.”

“I don’t either,” said Rebecca.

They were all in the south parlour. There was no light in the study opposite, and the door was ajar.

Presently Mrs. Brigham rose—she could not have told why; something seemed to impel her, some will outside her own. She went out of the room, again wrapping her rustling skirts around that she might pass noiselessly, and began pushing at the swollen door of the study.

“She has not got any lamp,” said Rebecca in a shaking voice.

Caroline, who was writing letters, rose again, took a lamp (there were two in the room) and followed her sister. Rebecca had risen, but she stood trembling, not venturing to follow.

The doorbell rang, but the others did not hear it; it was on the south door on the other side of the house from the study. Rebecca, after hesitating until the bell rang the second time, went to the door; she remembered that the servant was out.

Caroline and her sister Emma entered the study. Caroline set the lamp on the table. They looked at the wall. “Oh, my God,” gasped Mrs. Brigham, “there are—there are TWO—shadows.” The sisters stood clutching each other, staring at the awful things on the wall. Then Rebecca came in, staggering, with a telegram in her hand. “Here is—a telegram,” she gasped. “Henry is—dead.”

“Hark at the wind,” said Mr. White, who, having seen a fatal mistake after it was too late, was amiably desirous of preventing his son from seeing it.

“I’m listening,” said the latter, grimly surveying the board as he stretched out his hand. “Check.”

“I should hardly think that he’d come to-night,” said his father, with his hand poised over the board.

“Mate,” replied the son.

“That’s the worst of living so far out,” bawled Mr. White, with sudden and unlooked-for violence; “of all the beastly, slushy, out-of-the-way places to live in, this is the worst. Pathway’s a bog, and the road’s a torrent. I don’t know what people are thinking about. I suppose because only two houses in the road are let, they think it doesn’t matter.”

“Never mind, dear,” said his wife, soothingly; “perhaps you’ll win the next one.”

Mr. White looked up sharply, just in time to intercept a knowing glance between mother and son. The words died away on his lips, and he hid a guilty grin in his thin grey beard.

“There he is,” said Herbert White, as the gate banged to loudly and heavy footsteps came toward the door.

The old man rose with hospitable haste, and opening the door, was heard condoling with the new arrival. The new arrival also condoled with himself, so that Mrs. White said, “Tut, tut!” and coughed gently as her husband entered the room, followed by a tall, burly man, beady of eye and rubicund of visage.

“Sergeant-Major Morris,” he said, introducing him.

The sergeant-major shook hands, and taking the proffered seat by the fire, watched contentedly while his host got out whiskey and tumblers and stood a small copper kettle on the fire.

At the third glass his eyes got brighter, and he began to talk, the little family circle regarding with eager interest this visitor from distant parts, as he squared his broad shoulders in the chair and spoke of wild scenes and doughty deeds; of wars and plagues and strange peoples.

“Twenty-one years of it,” said Mr. White, nodding at his wife and son. “When he went away he was a slip of a youth in the warehouse. Now look at him.”

“He don’t look to have taken much harm,” said Mrs. White, politely.

“I’d like to go to India myself,” said the old man, “just to look round a bit, you know.”

“Better where you are,” said the sergeant-major, shaking his head. He put down the empty glass, and sighing softly, shook it again.

“I should like to see those old temples and fakirs and jugglers,” said the old man. “What was that you started telling me the other day about a monkey’s paw or something, Morris?”

“Nothing,” said the soldier, hastily. “Leastways nothing worth hearing.”

“Monkey’s paw?” said Mrs. White, curiously.

“Well, it’s just a bit of what you might call magic, perhaps,” said the sergeant-major, offhandedly.

His three listeners leaned forward eagerly. The visitor absent-mindedly put his empty glass to his lips and then set it down again. His host filled it for him.

“To look at,” said the sergeant-major, fumbling in his pocket, “it’s just an ordinary little paw, dried to a mummy.”

He took something out of his pocket and proffered it. Mrs. White drew back with a grimace, but her son, taking it, examined it curiously.

“And what is there special about it?” inquired Mr. White as he took it from his son, and having examined it, placed it upon the table.

“It had a spell put on it by an old fakir,” said the sergeant-major, “a very holy man. He wanted to show that fate ruled people’s lives, and that those who interfered with it did so to their sorrow. He put a spell on it so that three separate men could each have three wishes from it.”

His manner was so impressive that his hearers were conscious that their light laughter jarred somewhat.

“Well, why don’t you have three, sir?” said Herbert White, cleverly.

The soldier regarded him in the way that middle age is wont to regard presumptuous youth. “I have,” he said, quietly, and his blotchy face whitened.

“And did you really have the three wishes granted?” asked Mrs. White.

“I did,” said the sergeant-major, and his glass tapped against his strong teeth.

“And has anybody else wished?” persisted the old lady.

“The first man had his three wishes. Yes,” was the reply; “I don’t know what the first two were, but the third was for death. That’s how I got the paw.”

His tones were so grave that a hush fell upon the group.

“If you’ve had your three wishes, it’s no good to you now, then, Morris,” said the old man at last. “What do you keep it for?”

The soldier shook his head. “Fancy, I suppose,” he said, slowly. “I did have some idea of selling it, but I don’t think I will. It has caused enough mischief already. Besides, people won’t buy. They think it’s a fairy tale; some of them, and those who do think anything of it want to try it first and pay me afterward.”

“If you could have another three wishes,” said the old man, eyeing him keenly, “would you have them?”

“I don’t know,” said the other. “I don’t know.”

He took the paw, and dangling it between his forefinger and thumb, suddenly threw it upon the fire. White, with a slight cry, stooped down and snatched it off.

“Better let it burn,” said the soldier, solemnly.

“If you don’t want it, Morris,” said the other, “give it to me.”

“I won’t,” said his friend, doggedly. “I threw it on the fire. If you keep it, don’t blame me for what happens. Pitch it on the fire again like a sensible man.”

The other shook his head and examined his new possession closely. “How do you do it?” he inquired.

“Hold it up in your right hand and wish aloud,” said the sergeant-major, “but I warn you of the consequences.”

“Sounds like the Arabian Nights,” said Mrs. White, as she rose and began to set the supper. “Don’t you think you might wish for four pairs of hands for me?”

Her husband drew the talisman from pocket, and then all three burst into laughter as the sergeant-major, with a look of alarm on his face, caught him by the arm.

“If you must wish,” he said, gruffly, “wish for something sensible.”

Mr. White dropped it back in his pocket, and placing chairs, motioned his friend to the table. In the business of supper the talisman was partly forgotten, and afterward the three sat listening in an enthralled fashion to a second instalment of the soldier’s adventures in India.

“If the tale about the monkey’s paw is not more truthful than those he has been telling us,” said Herbert, as the door closed behind their guest, just in time for him to catch the last train, “we sha’nt make much out of it.”

“Did you give him anything for it, father?” inquired Mrs. White, regarding her husband closely.

“A trifle,” said he, colouring slightly. “He didn’t want it, but I made him take it. And he pressed me again to throw it away.”

“Likely,” said Herbert, with pretended horror. “Why, we’re going to be rich, and famous and happy. Wish to be an emperor, father, to begin with; then you can’t be henpecked.”

He darted round the table, pursued by the maligned Mrs. White armed with an antimacassar.

Mr. White took the paw from his pocket and eyed it dubiously. “I don’t know what to wish for, and that’s a fact,” he said, slowly. “It seems to me I’ve got all I want.”

“If you only cleared the house, you’d be quite happy, wouldn’t you?” said Herbert, with his hand on his shoulder. “Well, wish for two hundred pounds, then; that ’ll just do it.”

His father, smiling shamefacedly at his own credulity, held up the talisman, as his son, with a solemn face, somewhat marred by a wink at his mother, sat down at the piano and struck a few impressive chords.

“I wish for two hundred pounds,” said the old man distinctly.

A fine crash from the piano greeted the words, interrupted by a shuddering cry from the old man. His wife and son ran toward him.

“It moved,” he cried, with a glance of disgust at the object as it lay on the floor.

“As I wished, it twisted in my hand like a snake.”

“Well, I don’t see the money,” said his son as he picked it up and placed it on the table, “and I bet I never shall.”

“It must have been your fancy, father,” said his wife, regarding him anxiously.

He shook his head. “Never mind, though; there’s no harm done, but it gave me a shock all the same.”

They sat down by the fire again while the two men finished their pipes. Outside, the wind was higher than ever, and the old man started nervously at the sound of a door banging upstairs. A silence unusual and depressing settled upon all three, which lasted until the old couple rose to retire for the night.

“I expect you’ll find the cash tied up in a big bag in the middle of your bed,” said Herbert, as he bade them good-night, “and something horrible squatting up on top of the wardrobe watching you as you pocket your ill-gotten gains.”

He sat alone in the darkness, gazing at the dying fire, and seeing faces in it. The last face was so horrible and so simian that he gazed at it in amazement. It got so vivid that, with a little uneasy laugh, he felt on the table for a glass containing a little water to throw over it. His hand grasped the monkey’s paw, and with a little shiver he wiped his hand on his coat and went up to bed.

II.
In the brightness of the wintry sun next morning as it streamed over the breakfast table he laughed at his fears. There was an air of prosaic wholesomeness about the room which it had lacked on the previous night, and the dirty, shrivelled little paw was pitched on the sideboard with a carelessness which betokened no great belief in its virtues.

“I suppose all old soldiers are the same,” said Mrs. White. “The idea of our listening to such nonsense! How could wishes be granted in these days? And if they could, how could two hundred pounds hurt you, father?”

“Might drop on his head from the sky,” said the frivolous Herbert.

“Morris said the things happened so naturally,” said his father, “that you might if you so wished attribute it to coincidence.”

“Well, don’t break into the money before I come back,” said Herbert as he rose from the table. “I’m afraid it’ll turn you into a mean, avaricious man, and we shall have to disown you.”

His mother laughed, and following him to the door, watched him down the road; and returning to the breakfast table, was very happy at the expense of her husband’s credulity. All of which did not prevent her from scurrying to the door at the postman’s knock, nor prevent her from referring somewhat shortly to retired sergeant-majors of bibulous habits when she found that the post brought a tailor’s bill.

“Herbert will have some more of his funny remarks, I expect, when he comes home,” she said, as they sat at dinner.

“I dare say,” said Mr. White, pouring himself out some beer; “but for all that, the thing moved in my hand; that I’ll swear to.”

“You thought it did,” said the old lady soothingly.

“I say it did,” replied the other. “There was no thought about it; I had just—What’s the matter?”

His wife made no reply. She was watching the mysterious movements of a man outside, who, peering in an undecided fashion at the house, appeared to be trying to make up his mind to enter. In mental connection with the two hundred pounds, she noticed that the stranger was well dressed, and wore a silk hat of glossy newness. Three times he paused at the gate, and then walked on again. The fourth time he stood with his hand upon it, and then with sudden resolution flung it open and walked up the path. Mrs. White at the same moment placed her hands behind her, and hurriedly unfastening the strings of her apron, put that useful article of apparel beneath the cushion of her chair.

She brought the stranger, who seemed ill at ease, into the room. He gazed at her furtively, and listened in a preoccupied fashion as the old lady apologized for the appearance of the room, and her husband’s coat, a garment which he usually reserved for the garden. She then waited as patiently as her sex would permit, for him to broach his business, but he was at first strangely silent.

“I—was asked to call,” he said at last, and stooped and picked a piece of cotton from his trousers. “I come from ‘Maw and Meggins.’”

The old lady started. “Is anything the matter?” she asked, breathlessly. “Has anything happened to Herbert? What is it? What is it?”

Her husband interposed. “There, there, mother,” he said, hastily. “Sit down, and don’t jump to conclusions. You’ve not brought bad news, I’m sure, sir;” and he eyed the other wistfully.

“I’m sorry—” began the visitor.

“Is he hurt?” demanded the mother, wildly.

The visitor bowed in assent. “Badly hurt,” he said, quietly, “but he is not in any pain.”

“Oh, thank God!” said the old woman, clasping her hands. “Thank God for that! Thank—”

She broke off suddenly as the sinister meaning of the assurance dawned upon her and she saw the awful confirmation of her fears in the other’s averted face. She caught her breath, and turning to her slower-witted husband, laid her trembling old hand upon his. There was a long silence.

“He was caught in the machinery,” said the visitor at length in a low voice.

“Caught in the machinery,” repeated Mr. White, in a dazed fashion, “yes.”

He sat staring blankly out at the window, and taking his wife’s hand between his own, pressed it as he had been wont to do in their old courting-days nearly forty years before.

“He was the only one left to us,” he said, turning gently to the visitor. “It is hard.”

The other coughed, and rising, walked slowly to the window. “The firm wished me to convey their sincere sympathy with you in your great loss,” he said, without looking round. “I beg that you will understand I am only their servant and merely obeying orders.”

There was no reply; the old woman’s face was white, her eyes staring, and her breath inaudible; on the husband’s face was a look such as his friend the sergeant might have carried into his first action.

“I was to say that ‘Maw and Meggins’ disclaim all responsibility,” continued the other. “They admit no liability at all, but in consideration of your son’s services, they wish to present you with a certain sum as compensation.”

Mr. White dropped his wife’s hand, and rising to his feet, gazed with a look of horror at his visitor. His dry lips shaped the words, “How much?”

“Two hundred pounds,” was the answer.

Unconscious of his wife’s shriek, the old man smiled faintly, put out his hands like a sightless man, and dropped, a senseless heap, to the floor.

III.
In the huge new cemetery, some two miles distant, the old people buried their dead, and came back to a house steeped in shadow and silence. It was all over so quickly that at first they could hardly realize it, and remained in a state of expectation as though of something else to happen —something else which was to lighten this load, too heavy for old hearts to bear.

But the days passed, and expectation gave place to resignation—the hopeless resignation of the old, sometimes miscalled, apathy. Sometimes they hardly exchanged a word, for now they had nothing to talk about, and their days were long to weariness.

It was about a week after that the old man, waking suddenly in the night, stretched out his hand and found himself alone. The room was in darkness, and the sound of subdued weeping came from the window. He raised himself in bed and listened.

“Come back,” he said, tenderly. “You will be cold.”

“It is colder for my son,” said the old woman, and wept afresh.

The sound of her sobs died away on his ears. The bed was warm, and his eyes heavy with sleep. He dozed fitfully, and then slept until a sudden wild cry from his wife awoke him with a start.

“The paw!” she cried wildly. “The monkey’s paw!”

He started up in alarm. “Where? Where is it? What’s the matter?”

She came stumbling across the room toward him. “I want it,” she said, quietly. “You’ve not destroyed it?”

“It’s in the parlour, on the bracket,” he replied, marvelling. “Why?”

She cried and laughed together, and bending over, kissed his cheek.

“I only just thought of it,” she said, hysterically. “Why didn’t I think of it before? Why didn’t you think of it?”

“Think of what?” he questioned.

“The other two wishes,” she replied, rapidly. “We’ve only had one.”

“Was not that enough?” he demanded, fiercely.

“No,” she cried, triumphantly; “we’ll have one more. Go down and get it quickly, and wish our boy alive again.”

The man sat up in bed and flung the bedclothes from his quaking limbs. “Good God, you are mad!” he cried, aghast.

“Get it,” she panted; “get it quickly, and wish—Oh, my boy, my boy!”

Her husband struck a match and lit the candle. “Get back to bed,” he said, unsteadily. “You don’t know what you are saying.”

“We had the first wish granted,” said the old woman, feverishly; “why not the second?”

“A coincidence,” stammered the old man.

“Go and get it and wish,” cried his wife, quivering with excitement.

The old man turned and regarded her, and his voice shook. “He has been dead ten days, and besides he—I would not tell you else, but—I could only recognize him by his clothing. If he was too terrible for you to see then, how now?”

“Bring him back,” cried the old woman, and dragged him toward the door. “Do you think I fear the child I have nursed?”

He went down in the darkness, and felt his way to the parlour, and then to the mantelpiece. The talisman was in its place, and a horrible fear that the unspoken wish might bring his mutilated son before him ere he could escape from the room seized upon him, and he caught his breath as he found that he had lost the direction of the door. His brow cold with sweat, he felt his way round the table, and groped along the wall until he found himself in the small passage with the unwholesome thing in his hand.

Even his wife’s face seemed changed as he entered the room. It was white and expectant, and to his fears seemed to have an unnatural look upon it. He was afraid of her.

“Wish!” she cried, in a strong voice.

“It is foolish and wicked,” he faltered.

“Wish!” repeated his wife.

He raised his hand. “I wish my son alive again.”

The talisman fell to the floor, and he regarded it fearfully. Then he sank trembling into a chair as the old woman, with burning eyes, walked to the window and raised the blind.

He sat until he was chilled with the cold, glancing occasionally at the figure of the old woman peering through the window. The candle-end, which had burned below the rim of the china candlestick, was throwing pulsating shadows on the ceiling and walls, until, with a flicker larger than the rest, it expired. The old man, with an unspeakable sense of relief at the failure of the talisman, crept back to his bed, and a minute or two afterward the old woman came silently and apathetically beside him.

Neither spoke, but lay silently listening to the ticking of the clock. A stair creaked, and a squeaky mouse scurried noisily through the wall. The darkness was oppressive, and after lying for some time screwing up his courage, he took the box of matches, and striking one, went downstairs for a candle.

At the foot of the stairs the match went out, and he paused to strike another; and at the same moment a knock, so quiet and stealthy as to be scarcely audible, sounded on the front door.

The matches fell from his hand and spilled in the passage. He stood motionless, his breath suspended until the knock was repeated. Then he turned and fled swiftly back to his room, and closed the door behind him. A third knock sounded through the house.

“What’s that?” cried the old woman, starting up.

“A rat,” said the old man in shaking tones—“a rat. It passed me on the stairs.”

His wife sat up in bed listening. A loud knock resounded through the house.

“It’s Herbert!” she screamed. “It’s Herbert!”

She ran to the door, but her husband was before her, and catching her by the arm, held her tightly.

“What are you going to do?” he whispered hoarsely.

“It’s my boy; it’s Herbert!” she cried, struggling mechanically. “I forgot it was two miles away. What are you holding me for? Let go. I must open the door.”

“For God’s sake don’t let it in,” cried the old man, trembling.

“You’re afraid of your own son,” she cried, struggling. “Let me go. I’m coming, Herbert; I’m coming.”

There was another knock, and another. The old woman with a sudden wrench broke free and ran from the room. Her husband followed to the landing, and called after her appealingly as she hurried downstairs. He heard the chain rattle back and the bottom bolt drawn slowly and stiffly from the socket. Then the old woman’s voice, strained and panting.

“The bolt,” she cried, loudly. “Come down. I can’t reach it.”

But her husband was on his hands and knees groping wildly on the floor in search of the paw. If he could only find it before the thing outside got in. A perfect fusillade of knocks reverberated through the house, and he heard the scraping of a chair as his wife put it down in the passage against the door. He heard the creaking of the bolt as it came slowly back, and at the same moment he found the monkey’s paw, and frantically breathed his third and last wish.

The knocking ceased suddenly, although the echoes of it were still in the house. He heard the chair drawn back, and the door opened. A cold wind rushed up the staircase, and a long loud wail of disappointment and misery from his wife gave him courage to run down to her side, and then to the gate beyond. The street lamp flickering opposite shone on a quiet and deserted road.

I live at No.—Twenty-sixth Street, in this city. The house is in some respects a curious one. It has enjoyed for the last two years the reputation of being haunted. It is a large and stately residence, surrounded by what was once a garden, but which is now only a green inclosure used for bleaching clothes. The dry basin of what has been a fountain, and a few fruit-trees, ragged and unpruned, indicate that this spot, in past days, was a pleasant, shady retreat, filled with fruits and flowers and the sweet murmur of waters.

The house is very spacious. A hall of noble size leads to a vast spiral staircase winding through its center, while the various apartments are of imposing dimensions. It was built some fifteen or twenty years since by Mr. A–, the well-known New York merchant, who five years ago threw the commercial world into convulsions by a stupendous bank fraud. Mr. A–, as every one knows, escaped to Europe, and died not long after of a broken heart. Almost immediately after the news of his decease reached this country, and was verified, the report spread in Twenty-sixth Street that No.—was haunted. Legal measures had dispossessed the widow of its former owner, and it was inhabited merely by a care taker and his wife, placed there by the house agent into whose hands it had passed for purposes of renting or sale. These people declared that they were troubled with unnatural noises. Doors were opened without any visible agency. The remnants of furniture scattered through the various rooms were, during the night, piled one upon the other by unknown hands. Invisible feet passed up and down the stairs in broad daylight, accompanied by the rustle of unseen silk dresses, and the gliding of viewless hands along the massive balusters. The care taker and his wife declared that they would live there no longer. The house agent laughed, dismissed them, and put others in their place. The noises and supernatural manifestations continued. The neighborhood caught up the story, and the house remained untenanted for three years. Several persons negotiated for it; but somehow, always before the bargain was closed, they heard the unpleasant rumors, and declined to treat any further.

It was in this state of things that my landlady–who at that time kept a boarding-house in Bleecker Street, and who wished to move farther up town–conceived the bold idea of renting No.—Twenty-sixth Street. Happening to have in her house rather a plucky and philosophical set of boarders, she laid down her scheme before us, stating candidly everything she had heard respecting the ghostly qualities of the establishment to which she wished to remove us. With the exception of two timid persons,–a sea captain and a returned Californian, who immediately gave notice that they would leave,–all of Mrs. Moffat’s guests declared that they would accompany her in her chivalric incursion into the abode of spirits.

Our removal was effected in the month of May, and we were all charmed with our new residence. The portion of Twenty-sixth Street where our house is situated–between Seventh and Eighth Avenues–is one of the pleasantest localities in New York. The gardens back of the houses, running down nearly to the Hudson, form, in the summer time, a perfect avenue of verdure. The air is pure and invigorating, sweeping, as it does, straight across the river from the Weehawken heights, and even the ragged garden which surrounded the house on two sides, although displaying on washing days rather too much clothesline, still gave us a piece of greensward to look at, and a cool retreat in the summer evenings, where we smoked our cigars in the dusk, and watched the fireflies flashing their dark-lanterns in the long grass.

Of course we had no sooner established ourselves at No.—than we began to expect the ghosts. We absolutely awaited their advent with eagerness. Our dinner conversation was supernatural. One of the boarders, who had purchased Mrs. Crowe’s “Night Side of Nature” for his own private delectation, was regarded as a public enemy by the entire household for not having bought twenty copies. The man led a life of supreme wretchedness while he was reading this volume. A system of espionage was established, of which he was the victim. If he incautiously laid the book down for an instant and left the room, it was immediately seized and read aloud in secret places to a select few. I found myself a person of immense importance, it having leaked out that I was tolerably well versed in the history of supernaturalism, and had once written a story, entitled “The Pot of Tulips,” for Harper’s Monthly, the foundation of which was a ghost. If a table or a wainscot panel happened to warp when we were assembled in the large drawing-room, there was an instant silence, and every one was prepared for an immediate clanking of chains and a spectral form.

After a month of psychological excitement, it was with the utmost dissatisfaction that we were forced to acknowledge that nothing in the remotest degree approaching the supernatural had manifested itself. Once the butler asseverated that his candle had been blown out by some invisible agency while he was undressing himself for the night; but as I had more than once discovered this gentleman in a condition when one candle must have appeared to him like two, I thought it possible that, by going a step farther in his potations, he might have reversed his phenomenon, and seen no candle at all where he ought to have beheld one.

Things were in this state when an incident took place so awful and inexplicable in its character that my reason fairly reels at the bare memory of the occurrence. It was the tenth of July. After dinner was over I repaired with my friend, Dr. Hammond, to the garden to smoke my evening pipe. The Doctor and myself found ourselves in an unusually metaphysical mood. We lit our large meerschaums, filled with fine Turkish tobacco; we paced to and fro, conversing. A strange perversity dominated the currents of our thought. They would not flow through the sun-lit channels into which we strove to divert them. For some unaccountable reason they constantly diverged into dark and lonesome beds, where a continual gloom brooded. It was in vain that, after our old fashion, we flung ourselves on the shores of the East, and talked of its gay bazaars, of the splendors of the time of Haroun, of harems and golden palaces. Black afreets continually arose from the depths of our talk, and expanded, like the one the fisherman released from the copper vessel, until they blotted everything bright from our vision. Insensibly, we yielded to the occult force that swayed us, and indulged in gloomy speculation. We had talked some time upon the proneness of the human mind to mysticism, and the almost universal love of the Terrible, when Hammond suddenly said to me, “What do you consider to be the greatest element of Terror?”

The question, I own, puzzled me. That many things were terrible, I knew. Stumbling over a corpse in the dark; beholding, as I once did, a woman floating down a deep and rapid river, with wildly lifted arms, and awful, upturned face, uttering, as she sank, shrieks that rent one’s heart, while we, the spectators, stood frozen at a window which overhung the river at a height of sixty feet, unable to make the slightest effort to save her, but dumbly watching her last supreme agony and her disappearance. A shattered wreck, with no life visible, encountered floating listlessly on the ocean, is a terrible object, for it suggests a huge terror, the proportions of which are veiled. But it now struck me for the first time that there must be one great and ruling embodiment of fear, a King of Terrors to which all others must succumb. What might it be? To what train of circumstances would it owe its existence?

“I confess, Hammond,” I replied to my friend, “I never considered the subject before. That there must be one Something more terrible than any other thing, I feel. I cannot attempt, however, even the most vague definition.”

“I am somewhat like you, Harry,” he answered. “I feel my capacity to experience a terror greater than anything yet conceived by the human mind,–something combining in fearful and unnatural amalgamation hitherto supposed incompatible elements. The calling of the voices in Brockden Brown’s novel of ‘Wieland’ is awful; so is the picture of the Dweller of the Threshold, in Bulwer’s ‘Zanoni’; but,” he added, shaking his head gloomily, “there is something more horrible still than these.”

“Look here, Hammond,” I rejoined, “let us drop this kind of talk, for Heaven’s sake!”

“I don’t know what’s the matter with me to-night,” he replied, “but my brain is running upon all sorts of weird and awful thoughts. I feel as if I could write a story like Hoffman to night, if I were only master of a literary style.”

“Well, if we are going to be Hoffmanesque in our talk, I’m off to bed. How sultry it is! Good night, Hammond.”

“Good night, Harry. Pleasant dreams to you.”

“To you, gloomy wretch, afreets, ghouls, and enchanters.”

We parted, and each sought his respective chamber. I undressed quickly and got into bed, taking with me, according to my usual custom, a book, over which I generally read myself to sleep. I opened the volume as soon as I had laid my head upon the pillow, and instantly flung it to the other side of the room. It was Goudon’s “History of Monsters”–a curious French work, which I had lately imported from Paris, but which, in the state of mind I had then reached, was anything but an agreeable companion. I resolved to go to sleep at once; so, turning down my gas until nothing but a little blue point of light glimmered on the top of the tube, I composed myself to rest.

The room was in total darkness. The atom of gas that still remained lighted did not illuminate a distance of three inches round the burner. I desperately drew my arm across my eyes, as if to shut out even the darkness, and tried to think of nothing. It was in vain. The confounded themes touched on by Hammond in the garden kept obtruding themselves on my brain. I battled against them. I erected ramparts of would-be blankness of intellect to keep them out. They still crowded upon me. While I was lying still as a corpse, hoping that by a perfect physical inaction I should hasten mental repose, an awful incident occurred. A Something dropped, as it seemed, from the ceiling, plumb upon my chest, and the next instant I felt two bony hands encircling my throat, endeavoring to choke me.

I am no coward, and am possessed of considerable physical strength. The suddenness of the attack, instead of stunning me, strung every nerve to its highest tension. My body acted from instinct, before my brain had time to realize the terrors of my position. In an instant I wound two muscular arms around the creature, and squeezed it, with all the strength of despair, against my chest. In a few seconds the bony hands that had fastened on my throat loosened their hold, and I was free to breathe once more. Then commenced a struggle of awful intensity. Immersed in the most profound darkness, totally ignorant of the nature of the Thing by which I was so suddenly attacked, finding my grasp slipping every moment, by reason, it seemed to me, of the entire nakedness of my assailant, bitten with sharp teeth in the shoulder, neck, and chest, having every moment to protect my throat against a pair of sinewy, agile hands, which my utmost efforts could not confine–these were a combination of circumstances to combat which required all the strength and skill and courage that I possessed.

At last, after a silent, deadly, exhausting struggle, I got my assailant under by a series of incredible efforts of strength. Once pinned, with my knee on what I made out to be its chest, I knew that I was victor. I rested for a moment to breathe. I heard the creature beneath me panting in the darkness, and felt the violent throbbing of a heart. It was apparently as exhausted as I was; that was one comfort. At this moment I remembered that I usually placed under my pillow, before going to bed, a large yellow silk pocket handkerchief, for use during the night. I felt for it instantly; it was there. In a few seconds more I had, after a fashion, pinioned the creature’s arms.

I now felt tolerably secure. There was nothing more to be done but to turn on the gas, and, having first seen what my midnight assailant was like, arouse the household. I will confess to being actuated by a certain pride in not giving the alarm before; I wished to make the capture alone and unaided.

Never losing my hold for an instant, I slipped from the bed to the floor, dragging my captive with me. I had but a few steps to make to reach the gas-burner; these I made with the greatest caution, holding the creature in a grip like a vice. At last I got within arm’s-length of the tiny speck of blue light which told me where the gas-burner lay. Quick as lightning I released my grasp with one hand and let on the full flood of light. Then I turned to look at my captive.

I cannot even attempt to give any definition of my sensations the instant after I turned on the gas. I suppose I must have shrieked with terror, for in less than a minute afterward my room was crowded with the inmates of the house. I shudder now as I think of that awful moment. I saw nothing! Yes; I had one arm firmly clasped round a breathing, panting, corporeal shape, my other hand gripped with all its strength a throat as warm, and apparently fleshly, as my own; and yet, with this living substance in my grasp, with its body pressed against my own, and all in the bright glare of a large jet of gas, I absolutely beheld nothing! Not even an outline,–a vapor!

I do not, even at this hour, realize the situation in which I found myself. I cannot recall the astounding incident thoroughly. Imagination in vain tries to compass the awful paradox.

It breathed. I felt its warm breath upon my cheek. It struggled fiercely. It had hands. They clutched me. Its skin was smooth, like my own. There it lay, pressed close up against me, solid as stone,–and yet utterly invisible!

I wonder that I did not faint or go mad on the instant. Some wonderful instinct must have sustained me; for, absolutely, in place of loosening my hold on the terrible Enigma, I seemed to gain an additional strength in my moment of horror, and tightened my grasp with such wonderful force that I felt the creature shivering with agony.

Just then Hammond entered my room at the head of the household. As soon as he beheld my face–which, I suppose, must have been an awful sight to look at–he hastened forward, crying, “Great heaven, Harry! what has happened?”

“Hammond! Hammond!” I cried, “come here. Oh! this is awful! I have been attacked in bed by something or other, which I have hold of; but I can’t see it–I can’t see it!”

Hammond, doubtless struck by the unfeigned horror expressed in my countenance, made one or two steps forward with an anxious yet puzzled expression. A very audible titter burst from the remainder of my visitors. This suppressed laughter made me furious. To laugh at a human being in my position! It was the worst species of cruelty. Now, I can understand why the appearance of a man struggling violently, as it would seem, with an airy nothing, and calling for assistance against a vision, should have appeared ludicrous. Then, so great was my rage against the mocking crowd that had I the power I would have stricken them dead where they stood.

“Hammond! Hammond!” I cried again, despairingly, “for God’s sake come to me. I can hold the–the Thing but a short while longer. It is overpowering me. Help me! Help me!”

“Harry,” whispered Hammond, approaching me, “you have been smoking too much.”

“I swear to you, Hammond, that this is no vision,” I answered, in the same low tone. “Don’t you see how it shakes my whole frame with its struggles? If you don’t believe me, convince yourself. Feel it,–touch it.”

Hammond advanced and laid his hand on the spot I indicated. A wild cry of horror burst from him. He had felt it!

In a moment he had discovered somewhere in my room a long piece of cord, and was the next instant winding it and knotting it about the body of the unseen being that I clasped in my arms.

“Harry,” he said, in a hoarse, agitated voice, for, though he preserved his presence of mind, he was deeply moved, “Harry, it’s all safe now. You may let go, old fellow, if you’re tired. The Thing can’t move.”

I was utterly exhausted, and I gladly loosed my hold.

Hammond stood holding the ends of the cord that bound the Invisible, twisted round his hand, while before him, self-supporting as it were, he beheld a rope laced and interlaced, and stretching tightly round a vacant space. I never saw a man look so thoroughly stricken with awe. Nevertheless his face expressed all the courage and determination which I knew him to possess. His lips, although white, were set firmly, and one could perceive at a glance that, although stricken with fear, he was not daunted.

The confusion that ensued among the guests of the house who were witnesses of this extraordinary scene between Hammond and myself,–who beheld the pantomime of binding this struggling Something,–who beheld me almost sinking from physical exhaustion when my task of jailer was over–the confusion and terror that took possession of the bystanders, when they saw all this, was beyond description. The weaker ones fled from the apartment. The few who remained clustered near the door, and could not be induced to approach Hammond and his Charge. Still incredulity broke out through their terror. They had not the courage to satisfy themselves, and yet they doubted. It was in vain that I begged of some of the men to come near and convince themselves by touch of the existence in that room of a living being which was invisible. They were incredulous, but did not dare to undeceive themselves. How could a solid, living, breathing body be invisible, they asked. My reply was this. I gave a sign to Hammond, and both of us–conquering our fearful repugnance to touch the invisible creature–lifted it from the ground, manacled as it was, and took it to my bed. Its weight was about that of a boy of fourteen.

“Now, my friends,” I said, as Hammond and myself held the creature suspended over the bed, “I can give you self-evident proof that here is a solid, ponderable body which, nevertheless, you cannot see. Be good enough to watch the surface of the bed attentively.”

I was astonished at my own courage in treating this strange event so calmly; but I had recovered from my first terror, and felt a sort of scientific pride in the affair which dominated every other feeling.

The eyes of the bystanders were immediately fixed on my bed. At a given signal Hammond and I let the creature fall. There was the dull sound of a heavy body alighting on a soft mass. The timbers of the bed creaked. A deep impression marked itself distinctly on the pillow, and on the bed itself. The crowd who witnessed this gave a sort of low, universal cry, and rushed from the room. Hammond and I were left alone with our Mystery.

We remained silent for some time, listening to the low, irregular breathing of the creature on the bed, and watching the rustle of the bedclothes as it impotently struggled to free itself from confinement. Then Hammond spoke.

“Harry, this is awful.”

“Aye, awful.”

“But not unaccountable.”

“Not unaccountable! What do you mean? Such a thing has never occurred since the birth of the world. I know not what to think, Hammond. God grant that I am not mad, and that this is not an insane fantasy!”

“Let us reason a little, Harry. Here is a solid body which we touch, but which we cannot see. The fact is so unusual that it strikes us with terror. Is there no parallel, though, for such a phenomenon? Take a piece of pure glass. It is tangible and transparent. A certain chemical coarseness is all that prevents its being so entirely transparent as to be totally invisible. It is not theoretically impossible, mind you, to make a glass which shall not reflect a single ray of light–a glass so pure and homogeneous in its atoms that the rays from the sun shall pass through it as they do through the air, refracted but not reflected. We do not see the air, and yet we feel it.”

“That’s all very well, Hammond, but these are inanimate substances. Glass does not breathe, air does not breathe. This thing has a heart that palpitates,–a will that moves it,–lungs that play, and inspire and respire.”

“You forget the strange phenomena of which we have so often heard of late,” answered the Doctor, gravely. “At the meetings called ‘spirit circles,’ invisible hands have been thrust into the hands of those persons round the table–warm, fleshly hands that seemed to pulsate with mortal life.”

“What? Do you think, then, that this thing is–“

“I don’t know what it is,” was the solemn reply; “but please the gods I will, with your assistance, thoroughly investigate it.”

We watched together, smoking many pipes, all night long, by the bedside of the unearthly being that tossed and panted until it was apparently wearied out. Then we learned by the low, regular breathing that it slept.

The next morning the house was all astir. The boarders congregated on the landing outside my room, and Hammond and myself were lions. We had to answer a thousand questions as to the state of our extraordinary prisoner, for as yet not one person in the house except ourselves could be induced to set foot in the apartment.

The creature was awake. This was evidenced by the convulsive manner in which the bedclothes were moved in its efforts to escape. There was something truly terrible in beholding, as it were, those second-hand indications of the terrible writhings and agonized struggles for liberty which themselves were invisible.

Hammond and myself had racked our brains during the long night to discover some means by which we might realize the shape and general appearance of the Enigma. As well as we could make out by passing our hands over the creature’s form, its outlines and lineaments were human. There was a mouth; a round, smooth head without hair; a nose, which, however, was little elevated above the cheeks; and its hands and feet felt like those of a boy. At first we thought of placing the being on a smooth surface and tracing its outline with chalk, as shoemakers trace the outline of the foot. This plan was given up as being of no value. Such an outline would give not the slightest idea of its conformation.

A happy thought struck me. We would take a cast of it in plaster of Paris. This would give us the solid figure, and satisfy all our wishes. But how to do it? The movements of the creature would disturb the setting of the plastic covering, and distort the mold. Another thought. Why not give it chloroform? It had respiratory organs–that was evident by its breathing. Once reduced to a state of insensibility, we could do with it what we would. Doctor X—was sent for; and after the worthy physician had recovered from the first shock of amazement, he proceeded to administer the chloroform. In three minutes afterward we were enabled to remove the fetters from the creature’s body, and a well-known modeler of this city was busily engaged in covering the invisible form with the moist clay. In five minutes more we had a mold, and before evening a rough fac simile of the mystery. It was shaped like a man,–distorted, uncouth, and horrible, but still a man. It was small, not over four feet and some inches in height, and its limbs revealed a muscular development that was unparalleled. Its face surpassed in hideousness anything I had ever seen. Gustave Doré, or Callot, or Tony Johannot, never conceived anything so horrible. There is a face in one of the latter’s illustrations to “Un Voyage où il vous plaira,” which somewhat approaches the countenance of this creature, but does not equal it. It was the physiognomy of what I should have fancied a ghoul to be. It looked as if it was capable of feeding on human flesh.

Having satisfied our curiosity, and bound every one in the house to secrecy, it became a question what was to be done with our Enigma. It was impossible that we should keep such a horror in our house; it was equally impossible that such an awful being should be let loose upon the world. I confess that I would have gladly voted for the creature’s destruction. But who would shoulder the responsibility? Who would undertake the execution of this horrible semblance of a human being? Day after day this question was deliberated gravely. The boarders all left the house. Mrs. Moffat was in despair, and threatened Hammond and myself with all sorts of legal penalties if we did not remove the Horror. Our answer was, “We will go if you like, but we decline taking this creature with us. Remove it yourself if you please. It appeared in your house. On you the responsibility rests.” To this there was, of course, no answer. Mrs. Moffat could not obtain for love or money a person who would even approach the Mystery.

The most singular part of the transaction was that we were entirely ignorant of what the creature habitually fed on. Everything in the way of nutriment that we could think of was placed before it, but was never touched. It was awful to stand by, day after day, and see the clothes toss, and hear the hard breathing, and know that it was starving.

Ten, twelve days, a fortnight passed, and it still lived. The pulsations of the heart, however, were daily growing fainter, and had now nearly ceased altogether. It was evident that the creature was dying for want of sustenance. While this terrible life struggle was going on, I felt miserable. I could not sleep of nights. Horrible as the creature was, it was pitiful to think of the pangs it was suffering.

At last it died. Hammond and I found it cold and stiff one morning in the bed. The heart had ceased to beat, the lungs to inspire. We hastened to bury it in the garden. It was a strange funeral, the dropping of that viewless corpse into the damp hole. The cast of its form I gave to Dr. X–, who keeps it in his museum in Tenth Street.

As I am on the eve of a long journey from which I may not return, I have drawn up this narrative of an event the most singular that has ever come to my knowledge.

“And what are these, Paul?” asked Evelyn, opening a tarnished gold box and examining its contents curiously.

“Seeds of some unknown Egyptian plant,” replied Forsyth, with a sudden shadow on his dark face, as he looked down at the three scarlet grains lying in the white hand lifted to him.

“Where did you get them?” asked the girl.

“That is a weird story, which will only haunt you if I tell it,” said Forsyth, with an absent expression that strongly excited the girl’s curiosity.

“Please tell it, I like weird tales, and they never trouble me. Ah, do tell it; your stories are always so interesting,” she cried, looking up with such a pretty blending of entreaty and command in her charming face, that refusal was impossible.

“You’ll be sorry for it, and so shall I, perhaps; I warn you beforehand, that harm is foretold to the possessor of those mysterious seeds,” said Forsyth, smiling, even while he knit his black brows, and regarded the blooming creature before him with a fond yet foreboding glance.

“Tell on, I’m not afraid of these pretty atoms,” she answered, with an imperious nod.

“To hear is to obey. Let me read the facts, and then I will begin,” returned Forsyth, pacing to and fro with the far-off look of one who turns the pages of the past.

Evelyn watched him a moment, and then returned to her work, or play, rather, for the task seemed well suited to the vivacious little creature, half-child, half-woman.

“While in Egypt,” commenced Forsyth, slowly, “I went one day with my guide and Professor Niles, to explore the Cheops. Niles had a mania for antiquities of all sorts, and forgot time, danger and fatigue in the ardor of his pursuit. We rummaged up and down the narrow passages, half choked with dust and close air; reading inscriptions on the walls, stumbling over shattered mummy-cases, or coming face to face with some shriveled specimen perched like a hobgoblin on the little shelves where the dead used to be stowed away for ages. I was desperately tired after a few hours of it, and begged the professor to return. But he was bent on exploring certain places, and would not desist. We had but one guide, so I was forced to stay; but Jumal, my man, seeing how weary I was, proposed to us to rest in one of the larger passages, while he went to procure another guide for Niles. We consented, and assuring us that we were perfectly safe, if we did not quit the spot, Jumal left us, promising to return speedily. The professor sat down to take notes of his researches, and stretching my self on the soft sand, I fell asleep.

“I was roused by that indescribable thrill which instinctively warns us of danger, and springing up, I found myself alone. One torch burned faintly where Jumal had struck it, but Niles and the other light were gone. A dreadful sense of loneliness oppressed me for a moment; then I collected myself and looked well about me. A bit of paper was pinned to my hat, which lay near me, and on it, in the professor’s writing were these words:

“‘I’ve gone back a little to refresh my memory on certain points. Don’t follow me till Jumal comes. I can find my way back to you, for I have a clue. Sleep well, and dream gloriously of the Pharaohs. N N.’

“I laughed at first over the old enthusiast, then felt anxious then restless, and finally resolved to follow him, for I discovered a strong cord fastened to a fallen stone, and knew that this was the clue he spoke of. Leaving a line for Jumal, I took my torch and retraced my steps, following the cord along the winding ways. I often shouted, but received no reply, and pressed on, hoping at each turn to see the old man poring over some musty relic of antiquity. Suddenly the cord ended, and lowering my torch, I saw that the footsteps had gone on.

“‘Rash fellow, he’ll lose himself, to a certainty,’ I thought, really alarmed now.

“As I paused, a faint call reached me, and I answered it, waited, shouted again, and a still fainter echo replied.

“Niles was evidently going on, misled by the reverberations of the low passages. No time was to be lost, and, forgetting myself, I stuck my torch in the deep sand to guide me back to the clue, and ran down the straight path before me, whooping like a madman as I went. I did not mean to lose sight of the light, but in my eagerness to find Niles I turned from the main passage, and, guided by his voice, hastened on. His torch soon gladdened my eyes, and the clutch of his trembling hands told me what agony he had suffered.

“‘Let us get out of this horrible place at once,’ he said, wiping the great drops off his forehead.

“‘Come, we’re not far from the clue. I can soon reach it, and then we are safe’; but as I spoke, a chill passed over me, for a perfect labyrinth of narrow paths lay before us.

“Trying to guide myself by such land-marks as I had observed in my hasty passage, I followed the tracks in the sand till I fancied we must be near my light. No glimmer appeared, however, and kneeling down to examine the footprints nearer, I discovered, to my dismay, that I had been following the wrong ones, for among those marked by a deep boot-heel, were prints of bare feet; we had had no guide there, and Jumal wore sandals.

“Rising, I confronted Niles, with the one despairing word, ‘Lost!’ as I pointed from the treacherous sand to the fast-waning light.

“I thought the old man would be overwhelmed but, to my surprise, he grew quite calm and steady, thought a moment, and then went on, saying, quietly:

“‘Other men have passed here before us; let us follow their steps, for, if I do not greatly err, they lead toward great passages, where one’s way is easily found.’

“On we went, bravely, till a misstep threw the professor violently to the ground with a broken leg, and nearly extinguished the torch. It was a horrible predicament, and I gave up all hope as I sat beside the poor fellow, who lay exhausted with fatigue, remorse and pain, for I would not leave him.

“‘Paul,’ he said suddenly, ‘if you will not go on, there is one more effort we can make. I remember hearing that a party lost as we are, saved themselves by building a fire. The smoke penetrated further than sound or light, and the guide’s quick wit understood the unusual mist; he followed it, and rescued the party. Make a fire and trust to Jumal.’

“‘A fire without wood?’ I began; but he pointed to a shelf behind me, which had escaped me in the gloom; and on it I saw a slender mummy-case. I understood him, for these dry cases, which lie about in hundreds, are freely used as firewood. Reaching up, I pulled it down, believing it to be empty, but as it fell, it burst open, and out rolled a mummy. Accustomed as I was to such sights, it startled me a little, for danger had unstrung my nerves. Laying the little brown chrysalis aside, I smashed the case, lit the pile with my torch, and soon a light cloud of smoke drifted down the three passages which diverged from the cell-like place where we had paused.

“While busied with the fire, Niles, forgetful of pain and peril, had dragged the mummy nearer, and was examining it with the interest of a man whose ruling passion was strong even in death.

“‘Come and help me unroll this. I have always longed to be the first to see and secure the curious treasures put away among the folds of these uncanny winding-sheets. This is a woman, and we may find something rare and precious here,’ he said, beginning to unfold the outer coverings, from which a strange aromatic odor came.

“Reluctantly I obeyed, for to me there was something sacred in the bones of this unknown woman. But to beguile the time and amuse the poor fellow, I lent a hand, wondering as I worked, if this dark, ugly thing had ever been a lovely, soft-eyed Egyptian girl.

“From the fibrous folds of the wrappings dropped precious gums and spices, which half intoxicated us with their potent breath, antique coins, and a curious jewel or two, which Niles eagerly examined.

“All the bandages but one were cut off at last, and a small head laid bare, round which still hung great plaits of what had once been luxuriant hair. The shriveled hands were folded on the breast, and clasped in them lay that gold box.”

“Ah!” cried Evelyn, dropping it from her rosy palm with a shudder.

“Nay; don’t reject the poor little mummy’s treasure. I never have quite forgiven myself for stealing it, or for burning her,” said Forsyth, painting rapidly, as if the recollection of that experience lent energy to his hand.

“Burning her! Oh, Paul, what do you mean?” asked the girl, sitting up with a face full of excitement.

“I’ll tell you. While busied with Madame la Momie, our fire had burned low, for the dry case went like tinder. A faint, far-off sound made our hearts leap, and Niles cried out: ‘Pile on the wood; Jumal is tracking us; don’t let the smoke fail now or we are lost!’

“‘There is no more wood; the case was very small, and is all gone,’ I answered, tearing off such of my garments as would burn readily, and piling them upon the embers.

“Niles did the same, but the light fabrics were quickly consumed, and made no smoke.

“‘Burn that!’ commanded the professor, pointing to the mummy.

“I hesitated a moment. Again came the faint echo of a horn. Life was dear to me. A few dry bones might save us, and I obeyed him in silence.

“A dull blaze sprung up, and a heavy smoke rose from the burning mummy, rolling in volumes through the low passages, and threatening to suffocate us with its fragrant mist. My brain grew dizzy, the light danced before my eyes, strange phantoms seemed to people the air, and, in the act of asking Niles why he gasped and looked so pale, I lost consciousness.”

Evelyn drew a long breath, and put away the scented toys from her lap as if their odor oppressed her.

Forsyth’s swarthy face was all aglow with the excitement of his story, and his black eyes glittered as he added, with a quick laugh:

“That’s all; Jumal found and got us out, and we both forswore pyramids for the rest of our days.”

“But the box: how came you to keep it?” asked Evelyn, eyeing it askance as it lay gleaming in a streak of sunshine.

“Oh, I brought it away as a souvenir, and Niles kept the other trinkets.”

“But you said harm was foretold to the possessor of those scarlet seeds,” persisted the girl, whose fancy was excited by the tale, and who fancied all was not told.

“Among his spoils, Niles found a bit of parchment, which he deciphered, and this inscription said that the mummy we had so ungallantly burned was that of a famous sorceress who bequeathed her curse to whoever should disturb her rest. Of course I don’t believe that curse has anything to do with it, but it’s a fact that Niles never prospered from that day. He says it’s because he has never recovered from the fall and fright and I dare say it is so; but I sometimes wonder if I am to share the curse, for I’ve a vein of superstition in me, and that poor little mummy haunts my dreams still.”

A long silence followed these words. Paul painted mechanically and Evelyn lay regarding him with a thoughtful face. But gloomy fancies were as foreign to her nature as shadows are to noonday, and presently she laughed a cheery laugh, saying as she took up the box again:

“Why don’t you plant them, and see what wondrous flower they will bear?”

“I doubt if they would bear anything after lying in a mummy’s hand for centuries,” replied Forsyth, gravely.

“Let me plant them and try. You know wheat has sprouted and grown that was taken from a mummy’s coffin; why should not these pretty seeds? I should so like to watch them grow; may I, Paul?”

“No, I’d rather leave that experiment untried. I have a queer feeling about the matter, and don’t want to meddle myself or let anyone I love meddle with these seeds. They may be some horrible poison, or possess some evil power, for the sorceress evidently valued them, since she clutched them fast even in her tomb.”

“Now, you are foolishly superstitious, and I laugh at you. Be generous; give me one seed, just to learn if it will grow. See I’ll pay for it,” and Evelyn, who now stood beside him, dropped a kiss on his forehead as she made her request, with the most engaging air.

But Forsyth would not yield. He smiled and returned the embrace with lover-like warmth, then flung the seeds into the fire, and gave her back the golden box, saying, tenderly:

“My darling, I’ll fill it with diamonds or bonbons, if you please, but I will not let you play with that witch’s spells. You’ve enough of your own, so forget the ‘pretty seeds’ and see what a Light of the Harem I’ve made of you.”

Evelyn frowned, and smiled, and presently the lovers were out in the spring sunshine reveling in their own happy hopes, untroubled by one foreboding fear.

II

“I have a little surprise for you, love,” said Forsyth, as he greeted his cousin three months later on the morning of his wedding day.

“And I have one for you,” she answered, smiling faintly.

“How pale you are, and how thin you grow! All this bridal bustle is too much for you, Evelyn.” he said, with fond anxiety, as he watched the strange pallor of her face, and pressed the wasted little hand in his.

“I am so tired,” she said, and leaned her head wearily on her lover’s breast. “Neither sleep, food, nor air gives me strength, and a curious mist seems to cloud my mind at times. Mamma says it is the heat, but I shiver even in the sun, while at night I burn with fever. Paul, dear, I’m glad you are going to take me away to lead a quiet, happy life with you, but I’m afraid it will be a very short one.”

“My fanciful little wife! You are tired and nervous with all this worry, but a few weeks of rest in the country will give us back our blooming Eve again. Have you no curiosity to learn my surprise?” he asked, to change her thoughts.

The vacant look stealing over the girl’s face gave place to one of interest, but as she listened it seemed to require an effort to fix her mind on her lover’s words.

“You remember the day we rummaged in the old cabinet?”

“Yes,” and a smile touched her lips for a moment.

“And how you wanted to plant those queer red seeds I stole from the mummy?”

“I remember,” and her eyes kindled with sudden fire.

“Well, I tossed them into the fire, as I thought, and gave you the box. But when I went back to cover up my picture, and found one of those seeds on the rug, a sudden fancy to gratify your whim led me to send it to Niles and ask him to plant and report on its progress. Today I hear from him for the first time, and he reports that the seed has grown marvelously, has budded, and that he intends to take the first flower, if it blooms in time, to a meeting of famous scientific men, after which he will send me its true name and the plant itself. From his description, it must be very curious, and I’m impatient to see it.”

“You need not wait; I can show you the flower in its bloom,” and Evelyn beckoned with the mechante smile so long a stranger to her lips.

Much amazed, Forsyth followed her to her own little boudoir, and there, standing in the sunshine, was the unknown plant. Almost rank in their luxuriance were the vivid green leaves on the slender purple stems, and rising from the midst, one ghostly-white flower, shaped like the head of a hooded snake, with scarlet stamens like forked tongues, and on the petals glittered spots like dew.

“A strange, uncanny flower! Has it any odor?” asked Forsyth, bending to examine it, and forgetting, in his interest, to ask how it came there.

“None, and that disappoints me, I am so fond of perfumes,” answered the girl, caressing the green leaves which trembled at her touch, while the purple stems deepened their tint.

“Now tell me about it,” said Forsyth, after standing silent for several minutes.

“I had been before you, and secured one of the seeds, for two fell on the rug. I planted it under a glass in the richest soil I could find, watered it faithfully, and was amazed at the rapidity with which it grew when once it appeared above the earth. I told no-one, for I meant to surprise you with it; but this bud has been so long in blooming, I have had to wait. It is a good omen that it blossoms today, and as it is nearly white, I mean to wear it, for I’ve learned to love it, having been my pet for so long.”

“I would not wear it, for, in spite of its innocent color, it is an evil-looking plant, with its adder’s tongue and unnatural dew. Wait till Niles tells us what it is, then pet it if it is harmless.”

“Perhaps my sorceress cherished it for some symbolic beauty–those old Egyptians were full of fancies. It was very sly of you to turn the tables on me in this way. But I forgive you, since in a few hours, I shall chain this mysterious hand forever. How cold it is! Come out into the garden and get some warmth and color for tonight, my love.”

But when night came, no-one could reproach the girl with her pallor, for she glowed like a pomegranate-flower, her eyes were full of fire, her lips scarlet, and all her old vivacity seemed to have returned. A more brilliant bride never blushed under a misty veil, and when her lover saw her, he was absolutely startled by the almost unearthly beauty which transformed the pale, languid creature of the morning into this radiant woman.

They were married, and if love, many blessings, and all good gifts lavishly showered upon them could make them happy, then this young pair were truly blest. But even in the rapture of the moment that made her his, Forsyth observed how icy cold was the little hand he held, how feverish the deep color on the soft cheek he kissed, and what a strange fire burned in the tender eyes that looked so wistfully at him.

Blithe and beautiful as a spirit, the smiling bride played her part in all the festivities of that long evening, and when at last light, life and color began to fade, the loving eyes that watched her thought it but the natural weariness of the hour. As the last guest departed, Forsyth was met by a servant, who gave him a letter marked “Haste.” Tearing it open, he read these lines, from a friend of the professor’s:

“DEAR SIR–Poor Niles died suddenly two days ago, while at the Scientific Club, and his last words were: ‘Tell Paul Forsyth to beware of the Mummy’s Curse, for this fatal flower has killed me.’ The circumstances of his death were so peculiar, that I add them as a sequel to this message. For several months, as he told us, he had been watching an unknown plant, and that evening he brought us the flower to examine. Other matters of interest absorbed us till a late hour, and the plant was forgotten. The professor wore it in his buttonhole–a strange white, serpent-headed blossom, with pale glittering spots, which slowly changed to a glittering scarlet, till the leaves looked as if sprinkled with blood. It was observed that instead of the pallor and feebleness which had recently come over him, that the professor was unusually animated, and seemed in an almost unnatural state of high spirits. Near the close of the meeting, in the midst of a lively discussion, he suddenly dropped, as if smitten with apoplexy. He was conveyed home insensible, and after one lucid interval, in which he gave me the message I have recorded above, he died in great agony, raving of mummies, pyramids, serpents, and some fatal curse which had fallen upon him.

“After his death, livid scarlet spots, like those on the flower, appeared upon his skin, and he shriveled like a withered leaf. At my desire, the mysterious plant was examined, and pronounced by the best authority one of the most deadly poisons known to the Egyptian sorceresses. The plant slowly absorbs the vitality of whoever cultivates it, and the blossom, worn for two or three hours, produces either madness or death.”

Down dropped the paper from Forsyth’s hand; he read no further, but hurried back into the room where he had left his young wife. As if worn out with fatigue, she had thrown herself upon a couch, and lay there motionless, her face half-hidden by the light folds of the veil, which had blown over it.

“Evelyn, my dearest! Wake up and answer me. Did you wear that strange flower today?” whispered Forsyth, putting the misty screen away.

There was no need for her to answer, for there, gleaming spectrally on her bosom, was the evil blossom, its white petals spotted now with flecks of scarlet, vivid as drops of newly spilt blood.

But the unhappy bridegroom scarcely saw it, for the face above it appalled him by its utter vacancy. Drawn and pallid, as if with some wasting malady, the young face, so lovely an hour ago, lay before him aged and blighted by the baleful influence of the plant which had drunk up her life. No recognition in the eyes, no word upon the lips, no motion of the hand–only the faint breath, the fluttering pulse, and wide-opened eyes, betrayed that she was alive.

Alas for the young wife! The superstitious fear at which she had smiled had proved true: the curse that had bided its time for ages was fulfilled at last, and her own hand wrecked her happiness for ever. Death in life was her doom, and for years Forsyth secluded himself to tend with pathetic devotion the pale ghost, who never, by word or look, could thank him for the love that outlived even such a fate as this.