door. A few moments later a note was
handed me. I heard the boat steam away from the landing as I read it. It
was a hurried line from Richard. He said that he had been called away on
urgent business, and he begged me to make his adieux to Madame Arnault
and Felix. Felix was worried and perplexed by the sudden departure of
his guest. Helene said not a word, but very soon I saw her slipping down
the stair, and I knew that she had gone to her room. Her absence was
not remarked, for the ball was at its height. It was almost daylight
when the last dance was concluded, and the guests who were staying in
the house had retired to their rooms.

"Felix, having seen to the comfort of all, went at last to join his
wife. He burst into my room a second later almost crazed with horror and
grief. I followed him to this room. She was lying on a couch at the foot
of the bed. One arm was thrown across her forehead, the other hung to
the floor, and in her hand she held a tiny silver bottle with a jewelled
stopper. A handkerchief, with a single drop of blood upon it, was lying
on her bosom. A faint curious odor exhaled from her lips and hung about
the room, but the poison had left no other trace.

"No one save ourselves and Marcelite ever knew the truth. She had danced
too much at the ball that night, and she had died suddenly of
heart-disease. We buried her out yonder in the old Raymonde-Arnault
burying-ground. I do not know what the letter contained which Felix
wrote to Richard. He never uttered his name afterwards. The ballroom,
the whole wing, in truth, was at once closed. Everything was left
exactly as it was on that fatal night. A few years ago, the house being
unexpectedly full, I opened the room in which you have been staying, and
it has been used from time to time as a guest-room since. My son lived
some years, prematurely old, heart-broken, and desolate. He died with
her name on his lips."

Madame Arnault stopped.

A suffocating sensation was creeping over her listener. Only in the past
few moments had the signification of the story begun to dawn upon him.
"Do you mean," he gasped, "that the girl whom I--that she is--was--"

"Helene, the dead wife of Felix Arnault," she replied, gravely. "Her
restless spirit has walked here before. I have sometimes heard her
tantalizing laugh echo through the house, but no one had ever seen her
until you came--so like the Richard Keith she loved!"

"When I read your letter," she went on, aft