fro in the windows
of the Hall. 'My poor father is dead,' I said. I turned and ran up
the road. 'Oh, that I could have seen him once again!' At the hall
door I was met by a servant, and learnt that, while I had been
love-making on the sands, a message had come from the Continent with
news of my father's death.

VI

There was no meeting Winifred on the next night.

It was decided that my uncle's private secretary should go to
Switzerland to bring the body to England. I (remembering my promise
about the mementos) insisted on accompanying him. We started on the
morrow, preceded by a message to my father's Swiss friends ordering
an embalmment. Before starting I tried to see Winifred; but she had
gone to Dullingham.

On our arrival at the little Swiss town, we found that the embalmment
had been begun. The body was still in the hands of a famous
embalmer--an Italian Jew settled at Geneva, the only successful rival
there of Professor Laskowski. He was celebrated for having revived
the old Hebraic method of embalmment in spices, and improving it by
the aid of the modern discoveries in antiseptics of Laskowski, Signer
Franchina of Naples, and Dr. Dupre of Paris. This physician told me
that by his process the body would, without the peculiarly-sealed
coffin used by the Swiss embalmers, last 'firm and white as Carrara
marble for a thousand years.'

The people at the chalet had naturally been much astonished to find
upon my father's breast a jewelled cross lying. As soon as I entered
the house they handed it to me.

For some reason or another this amulet and the curse had haunted my
imagination as much as if I believed in amulets and curses, though my
reason told me that everything of the kind was sheer nonsense. I
could not sleep for thinking about it, and in the night I rose from
my bed, and, opening the window, held up the cross in the moonlight.
The facets caught the silvery rays and focussed them. The amulet
seemed to shudder with some prophecy of woe. It was now that, for the
first time, I began to feel the signs of that great struggle between
reason and the inherited instinct of superstition which afterwards
played so important a part in my life. I then took up the parchment
scroll, and opened it and re-read the curse. The great letters in
which the English version was printed seemed to me larger by the
light of the moon than they had seemed by daylight.

We had to wait for some time in Switzerland. In a locke