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When he found himself alone in a front garden of tolerable size, he began to find the situation singular. Then a lurking suspicion that it might prove disagreeable obtruded itself. He glanced up at the front of the house, which was of the usual commonplace bowwindowed pattern, and was struck by the fact that there was no appearance of occupation. To resolve this doubt at once he knocked. at the door. The sound seemed to raise a dozen melancholy echoes in the neighbourhood; but after these had died away in a lowspirited style, there was no response from the interior of Laburnum Villa. At this point a servant, in full evening dress of light cotton print, fluttered across from one of the nearest villas for the purpose of informing him that, Please, sir, no one lives in that 'ouse.' 'No one! Is it left to take care of itself?'

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O no, sir. There's a person-leastways an old womanin the daytime, but she don't live there regular. No one has lived there regular since Miss Steel died.'

After imparting these agreeable facts, the servant fluttered genteelly away again, leaving Withers standing on the door-step with an awkward consciousness that, from the drawing-room window of the nearest villa, eyes were bent upon him through the laths of the venetians. It would be absurd to retreat. He took the key from his pocket and entered.

Falling over a pail, happily empty, which had been carelessly left in the little hall, did not tend to put him in a good temper, or to decrease the nervousness that had been growing upon him all day. He sat down on the pail, rubbed his shins, and tried to realise the situation. Alone in a strange house, with nothing to eat, and with that faint sickness upon him which comes of the fatigue and semi-starvation of express travelling. Obviously the thing to do was to look for the kitchen. There might be something to cat: at any rate the chance was worth trying. Fortunately the kitchen was not far off, on the ground-floor, and he groped his way there without much difficulty. Here he was rejoiced by discovering the remains of a good fire, and received a momentary shock from a woman's dress, which was hanging from a hook in a way suggestive, in the dim light from the grate, of the person-leastways the old woman' -having made a violent end of herself. A box of matches was the next fortunate discovery made by Withers, who began to feel himself a sort of Crusoe; but after burning two or three in a vain attempt to light the gas, he was forced to the unpleasant conclusion that it was either turned off at the meter, or cut off' by the gas company. Deferring farther experiments in this direction for the present, he began, with the aid of a candle, to search for provisions. The prosecution of this laudable object naturally took him into the pantry. He was standing here, holding the candle above his head, and peering anxiously about the shelves, when he heard

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close to him, as it seemed, the shrill treble shout in which boyhood
proclaims its eternal war with mankind. Yah! yah! the post!' the
cry
sounded like. What did they mean by 'post'? Withers opened
the window a little way, and listened more intently. The juvenile
destroyers of peace were some distance across the field by this time,
so he couldn't be sure whether his ears deceived him or not; but
he certainly thought he heard Yah! yah! the ghost!' It was very
absurd, of course; but still Withers felt queer' as he closed the
window again and continued his search. He was rewarded by a
magnificent find'-a half-consumed meat-pie in prime condition,
doubtless the personal property of the person' before mentioned.
It was evident that she, at least, was no ghost, which was so far
satisfactory. With the help of the brandy in his travelling-flask,
Withers made a hearty supper off the meat-pie; and, strange to
say, never bestowed a thought on the probability of its disagree-
ing' with him—a subject upon which, on ordinary occasions, he was
wont to be discreetly but pathetically eloquent.

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Now for the meter,' thought Withers, after finishing supper by the light of his solitary candle. He had always entertained rather a high opinion of himself, had Withers, in a modest selfcontained way; but now, under the combined influence of meatpie, brandy, and a pipe of cavendish, he began to think he had done himself scanty justice. Strange,' he mused over his pipe, how a novel situation, strange conditions, bring out what is self-reliant in a man. How soon a fellow with any stuff in him grasps and subdues unfamiliar surroundings! The curled and scented military darling of drawing-rooms becomes a hero in war and a Spartan in the camp. The refined son of metropolitan civilisation, the polished cynic of club smoking-rooms, goes to the diggings, and straightway becomes "hail fellow well met" with navvies, and a thoroughgoing advocate of Lynch law.' And then Withers began to think pleasantly of his own fertility of resource, though he had, after all, only gone into an unoccupied house, and consumed another person's provisions. Rousing himself from such meditations with a gentle melancholy upon him, as became a person never destined to be thoroughly appreciated, he went to look for the meter. He found the place where the meter had been, but that was all. This being an emergency to which his resources were by no means equal, he began to doubt the absolute sufficiency of self-reliance under all circumstances. At any rate, no tolerably efficient substitute for the missing meter suggested itself to him, so he determined to distinguish himself in another unfamiliar direction. Returning upstairs, he occupied an hour or so very pleasantly, blacking his face and hands to an impossible extent, in the attempt to light a fire in the dining-room. He had chosen the dining-room to pass the night in in preference to running the risk of damp beds, because it was

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compact, not to say diminutive, in its proportions, and therefore more easily warmed and lighted by a fire and a couple of candles. Here, then, after the completion of his arrangements, he will be left to continue the story in his own words.

I do not know what the general experience in such cases may be, but I never can feel on thoroughly good terms with other people's furniture; there is a sense of antagonism which I find it impossible to subdue. Even while lounging in the very comfortable easy-chair in the dining-room of Laburnum Villa, I felt as strongly as possible that I was being seated under protest. The companion easy-chair balancing mine on the opposite side of the fire-place had, to my sensitive mind, a distinctly disparaging expression in its arms, and a shrug, as of contempt, in its well-stuffed back. A fiercely-gilt warrior, who was careering at a terrible rate on the top of a clock (run down and silent) decorating the mantelpiece, seemed to point his weapon at me in an openly threatening manner, and challenge me to mortal combat. Even the engravings on the walls rejected me as an alien. 'Shakespeare and his Contemporaries' were evidently engaged in discussing me in an unfavourable spirit; and Frith's Merrymakers' ignored me so completely that I ought to have sunk terribly in my own esteem. There was a portrait in oil, too, of a gentleman, which it was impossible to escape, because it hung opposite the chimney-glass; so that whenever I raised my head, I caught it apparently looking at me over the mantelpiece with an unmistakable expression of indignant surprise. I could almost hear it saying in an injured tone, What the deuce is that fellow doing in my dining-room!'

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This state of feeling was becoming intensified to a most disagreeable pitch, when a framed photograph 'caught my eye'-if I may be permitted to use the phrase-and gave a new turn to my thoughts. It was a full-length of a young lady with one of the most singular faces I ever saw in my life; not a pleasant face by any means, but full of decided character, though the mouth and chin were weak without being feminine. I thought, with something like a shudder of repugnance, that Elsie Venner-that curious creature with the reptile taint in her blood-must have looked like this girl, who seemed to have nothing of girlhood about her but its physical weakness. The small colourless face, with its retreating chin, unsmiling mouth, and slightly prominent nose, its sloping narrow forehead and brilliant black eyes, had such a repellent unsympathetic character, that it created the most disagreeable impressions. I returned to my seat, from which I had risen to examine the portrait; but I found it impossible to shake-off the feeling it had produced. It was as repugnant to me as if it had been some noxious thing endowed with a sluggish vitality which found expression in the glittering eyes alone: they seemed to hold me with a triumphant consciousness of their power,

though they were looking in another direction, out of the picture, but not at the spectator. I got up under an uncontrollable impulse, and turned the face to the wall. In doing so, I discovered that on the back of the frame there was pasted one of those 'funeral cards' which some people are in the habit of sending to their friends on the occasion of a death in the family. That there might be no mistake as to the identity of the Laura Steel' here mentioned, a miniature photograph was affixed at the top of the card. So Laura Steel was the name of the unprepossessing young lady, and she was dead. All the nameless fascination went out of those singular orbs at the thought, and I felt something like remorse for my fancies about her.

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I ought to have begun to feel fatigued by this time; but though I lay back as comfortably as possible in the easy-chair, put my feet on the fender, and stared at the fire, no drooping of the eyelids hinted at an approaching doze. It was no use trying to persuade myself that I wanted to take forty winks.' The fact was not to be disguised that I was most distressingly wakeful, restless, and listening; distinctly listening, for I caught myself in the act. It was very plain that nature was revenging itself for my ill-spent day in the abnormal activity of my nervous system. I got up, and going to a book-case

in a recess, took down a volume at random. It proved to be a collection of German plays of the sanguinary school: Lessing's Emilia Galotti, Schiller's Robbers, and others of the same type. This proved a fortunate speculation; and I soon found myself going through the most harrowing and bloodthirsty scenes with that luxurious sense of suspended attention which is the first phase of an inevitable doze. Emilia was about to stab herself, and I was just nodding my admiration of her courage and virtue, when suddenly I started up broad awake, and let the book fall. I glanced almost involuntarily at the photograph, and saw, or fancied I saw, in the averted glittering eyes the same indefinable expression revived that had struck me so unpleasantly at first. What was it that had startled me? I did not know. Still less could I explain the intensity of a new sensation, possessing me completely, which seemed to hold all my being in the one act of listening.

A house does not need to be old and dilapidated in order to supply plenty of mysterious noises; indeed, new houses are more prolific in this respect than old ones. I heard any quantity of the usual creaking, straining, and flapping in Laburnum Villa, but nothing to which I felt inclined to give any special significance. After a few minutes, therefore, the acute tension of my nerves began to relax, and I turned once more to my book. Here I met with a disappointment; for I soon became sensible that the horrors of the German dramatist had lost their soporific effect, and, inexplicably enough, were acting as an irritant. I was reading with sharpened senses, and realising what I read. It was another disagreeable surprise to find that the late

Miss Steel-or, at least, my idea of her-was getting involved in the scenes, identifying herself with the sanguinary interest as a pervading evil influence. The criminal personages seemed to gleam at me from the page with the snake-like brilliancy of her eyes, and the malignant bitterness of the wicked speeches to come from the same lax unsmiling lips. I threw down the book impatiently, and began to trim the candles; but though I smiled while doing so at the idea of being reduced to candles in this age of gas, I could not help noticing that my hands trembled violently. I was so awkward about my work that I nearly extinguished the light. I poked the fire into a blaze,

and set myself resolutely to think.

Some considerable time passed in a vain attempt to resume the mastery of myself; but I gave up the struggle at last, and resigned myself passively to wait and listen. I was sensible of no alarm, or even anxiety; I was simply held down, physically and mentally, and kept quiet. An imperious expectation of something, I did not know what, absorbed every sense and faculty of my being. How long I half sat, half lay thus, I do not know. Nature seemed to stand still; there was no time, and everything came to a breathless pause.

Then over this dead peace there came stealing a subtle infection of terror. The air was charged with it as with a plague. This horror gathered and thickened, like the darkness before a storm, until it became a palpable oppression. My body was paralysed; only my soul struggled feebly against the threatenings of madness or death.

It came at last. With my quickened senses, I could hear the stir in the air that heralded its approach, as if the atmosphere of Nature recoiled from the awful thing. It was in the room, and I recognised the figure at once, though the face was turned from me : the girl of the portrait with the snake-like eyes. I felt that if those eyes met mine, I should go mad; and yet I was powerless to look away, or move, or cry out. My heart stood still, and life was slipping away from my paralysed grasp. It was kneeling before the drawers in the lower part of the book-case, and appeared to be searching anxiously in one of them. Suddenly it recoiled, and threw its arms wildly above its head. It arose swiftly, and in the instant it stood erect was confronted by another figure, that of an old man. It seemed to read a sentence of condemnation in the face of this second comer, for it sank into a kneeling position, and clasped the other despairingly by the knees. There were savagely-rapid blows rained upon the face of the petitioner, upturned in an agony of entreaty, and a furious thrusting away. With a long wailing scream, it rolled writhing almost at my feet, and the awful eyes glared full into mine. Merciful oblivion came upon me, and I fell into a death-like unconsciousness.

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