fter the whole matter from our minds.

Some weeks later it happened that Uncle Thomas, while paying us a flying
visit, produced from his pocket a copy of the latest weekly, Psyche: a
Journal of the Unseen; and proceeded laborously to rid himself of
much incomprehensible humour, apparently at our expense. We bore it
patiently, with the forced grin demanded by convention, anxious to
get at the source of inspiration, which it presently appeared lay in a
paragraph circumstantially describing our modest and humdrum habitation.
"Case III.," it began. "The following particulars were communicated by
a young member of the Society, of undoubted probity and earnestness,
and are a chronicle of actual and recent experience." A fairly accurate
description of the house followed, with details that were unmistakable;
but to this there succeeded a flood of meaningless drivel about
apparitions, nightly visitants, and the like, writ in a manner
betokening a disordered mind, coupled with a feeble imagination. The
fellow was not even original. All the old material was there,--the storm
at night, the haunted chamber, the white lady, the murder re-enacted,
and so on,--already worn threadbare in many a Christmas Number. No one
was able to make head or tail of the stuff, or of its connexion with
our quiet mansion; and yet Edward, who had always suspected the man,
persisted in maintaining that our tutor of a brief span was, somehow or
other, at the bottom of it.

A FALLING OUT

Harold told me the main facts of this episode some time later,--in bits,
and with reluctance. It was not a recollection he cared to talk about.
The crude blank misery of a moment is apt to leave a dull bruise which
is slow to depart, if it ever does so entirely; and Harold confesses
to a twinge or two, still, at times, like the veteran who brings home a
bullet inside him from martial plains over sea.

He knew he was a brute the moment he had done it; Selina had not meant
to worry, only to comfort and assist. But his soul was one raw sore
within him, when he found himself shut up in the schoolroom after hours,
merely for insisting that 7 times 7 amounted to 47. The injustice of it
seemed so flagrant. Why not 47 as much as 49? One number was no prettier
than the other to look at, and it was evidently only a matter of
arbitrary taste and preference, and, anyhow, it had always been 47 to
him, and would be to the end of time. So when Selina came in out of the
sun, lea