ch but with a record that bars him from getting
another one. I do not say this state of affairs is universal. But I _do_
say, from bitter experience, that it is far too prevalent. Forgive my
digression. I will get back to my statement with all speed.

I have told of the "compact" between Peter Grimm and Andrew McPherson.
Mr. Grimm died. Kathrien had promised him to marry his nephew, Frederik.
She did not love him. She did love James Hartmann. She has admitted both
those facts to me.

As the time for the wedding drew near, she was more and more loath to
carry out her promise. McPherson attributes that distaste to the
spiritual promptings of Peter Grimm. Can any normal woman (who has been
forced to marry one man while loving another) see the remotest hint of
the Supernatural in it? No!

Willem, a boy of epileptic tendencies--as McPherson himself admits--had
taken his benefactor's death terribly to heart, and had brooded over it
day and night. Is there any reason to doubt that in such an unbalanced
nature, this brooding, coupled by fever, should have produced a delirium
in which he believed he heard Peter Grimm speaking to him?

He also believed, Kathrien tells me, that he heard the circus parade
pass the house ten days after it had left town. Is one belief entitled
to greater credence than the other? Or did the ghost of a circus parade
meander through our Main street at night, accompanied by a Spook brass
band? Each idea is quite as probable as the other.

And, from the boy's own statement, Peter Grimm said to him nothing
original or even betokening a mind more developed than a child's. Willem
knew Kathrien was going to marry Frederik. He knew she did not want to
and that he himself disliked and feared Frederik. What more likely than
that he should imagine he heard Peter forbid the match?

What more likely, in his own fevered unhappiness, than that he should
think Peter Grimm said "I am very unhappy"? Would a man of Peter Grimm's
strength and shrewdness come back to earth and tell the child nothing of
greater importance than Willem says he told? And, if he could make
Willem understand such phrases as "I am very unhappy" and "Kathrien must
not marry Frederik," could he not have made the boy understand anything
else?

As to Frederik Grimm:--Frederik, we know, was nervous and overwrought.
His uncle's death had been a shock--if not a grief. He had the added
worry of knowing Kathrien did not really love him. He was in c