low and the flames of the candles
were licking the rims of the Sheffield sticks. Sluggishly he rose,
yawned, went his nightly round of door-locks and window-fastenings, and
passed into his bedroom. Soon he slept soundly.

But a curious little sequel followed on the morrow. Mrs. Barrett usually
tapped, not at his door, but at the wooden wall beyond which lay Oleron's
bed; and then Oleron rose, put on his dressing-gown, and admitted her. He
was not conscious that as he did so that morning he hummed an air; but
Mrs. Barrett lingered with her hand on the door-knob and her face a
little averted and smiling.

"De-ar me!" her soft falsetto rose. "But that will be a very o-ald tune,
Mr. Oleron! I will not have heard it this for-ty years!"

"What tune?" Oleron asked.

"The tune, indeed, that you was humming, sir."

Oleron had his thumb in the flap of a letter. It remained there.

"_I_ was humming?... Sing it, Mrs. Barrett."

Mrs. Barrett prut-prutted.

"I have no voice for singing, Mr. Oleron; it was Ann Pugh was the singer
of our family; but the tune will be very o-ald, and it is called 'The
Beckoning Fair One.'"

"Try to sing it," said Oleron, his thumb still in the envelope; and Mrs.
Barrett, with much dimpling and confusion, hummed the air.

"They do say it was sung to a harp, Mr. Oleron, and it will be very
o-ald," she concluded.

"And _I_ was singing that?"

"Indeed you wass. I would not be likely to tell you lies."

With a "Very well--let me have breakfast," Oleron opened his letter; but
the trifling circumstance struck him as more odd than he would have
admitted to himself. The phrase he had hummed had been that which he had
associated with the falling from the tap on the evening before.

V

Even more curious than that the commonplace dripping of an ordinary
water-tap should have tallied so closely with an actually existing air
was another result it had, namely, that it awakened, or seemed to awaken,
in Oleron an abnormal sensitiveness to other noises of the old house. It
has been remarked that silence obtains its fullest and most impressive
quality when it is broken by some minute sound; and, truth to tell, the
place was never still. Perhaps the mildness of the spring air operated on
its torpid old timbers; perhaps Oleron's fires caused it to stretch its
old anatomy; and certainly a whole world of insect life bored and
burrowed in its baulks and joists. At any rate, Oleron had only to sit
quiet in