afternoon, whilst the servants were
having their tea, Martha found herself alone in the upper part of the
house with her precious nephew. Mr. Whittingen had gone to Edinburgh
to consult his lawyer (the head of the firm with whom Harvey was
articled) on business, whilst Mrs. Whittingen had taken her son and
daughter-in-law for a drive. The weather was glorious, and Martha,
though as little appreciative of the beauties of nature as most
commercial-minded young women, could not but admire the colouring of
the sky as she looked out of the nursery window. The sun had
disappeared, but the effect of its rays was still apparent on the
western horizon, where the heavens were washed with alternate streaks
of gold and red and pink--the colour of each streak excessively
brilliant in the centre, but paling towards the edges. Here and there
were golden, pink-tipped clouds and crimson islets surrounded with
seas of softest blue. And outside the limits of this sun-kissed pale,
the blue of the sky gradually grew darker and darker, until its line
was altogether lost in the black shadows of night that, creeping over
the lone mountain-tops in the far east, slowly swept forward. Wafted
by the gentle breeze came the dull moaning and whispering of the pine
trees, the humming of the wind through the telephone wires, and the
discordant cawing of the crows. And it seemed to Martha, as she sat
there and peered out into the garden, that over the whole atmosphere
of the place had come a subtle and hostile change--a change in the
noises of the trees, the birds, the wind; a change in the
flower-scented ether; a change, a most marked and emphatic change, in
the shadows. What was it? What was this change? Whence did it
originate? What did it portend? A slight noise, a most trivial noise,
attracted Martha's attention to the room; she looked round and was
quite startled to see how dark it had grown. In the old days, when she
had scoffed at ghosts, she would as soon have been in the dark as in
the light, the night had no terrors for her; but now--now since those
awful occurrences last year, all was different, and as she peered
apprehensively about her, her flesh crawled. What was there in that
corner opposite, that corner hemmed in on the one side by the
cupboard--how she hated cupboards, particularly when they had shiny
surfaces on which were reflected all sorts of curious things--and the
chest of drawers on the other. It was a shadow, only a shadow, but