second match. A candle stood on the
table. He lighted it, and the flame sank for a moment and then burned up
clear. Again he looked round.

There was nothing.

There was nothing; but there had been something, and might still be
something. Formerly, Oleron had smiled at the fantastic thought that,
by a merging and interplay of identities between himself and his
beautiful room, he might be preparing a ghost for the future; it had not
occurred to him _that there might have been a similar merging and
coalescence in the past_. Yet with this staggering impossibility he was
now face to face. Something did persist in the house; it had a tenant
other than himself; and that tenant, whatsoever or whosoever, had
appalled Oleron's soul by producing the sound of a woman brushing her
hair.

VII

Without quite knowing how he came to be there Oleron found himself
striding over the loose board he had temporarily placed on the step
broken by Miss Bengough. He was hatless, and descending the stairs. Not
until later did there return to him a hazy memory that he had left the
candle burning on the table, had opened the door no wider than was
necessary to allow the passage of his body, and had sidled out, closing
the door softly behind him. At the foot of the stairs another shock
awaited him. Something dashed with a flurry up from the disused cellars
and disappeared out of the door. It was only a cat, but Oleron gave a
childish sob.

He passed out of the gate, and stood for a moment under the "To Let"
boards, plucking foolishly at his lip and looking up at the glimmer
of light behind one of his red blinds. Then, still looking over his
shoulder, he moved stumblingly up the square. There was a small
public-house round the corner; Oleron had never entered it; but he
entered it now, and put down a shilling that missed the counter by
inches.

"B--b--bran--brandy," he said, and then stooped to look for the shilling.

He had the little sawdusted bar to himself; what company there
was--carters and labourers and the small tradesmen of the
neighbourhood--was gathered in the farther compartment, beyond the space
where the white-haired landlady moved among her taps and bottles. Oleron
sat down on a hardwood settee with a perforated seat, drank half his
brandy, and then, thinking he might as well drink it as spill it,
finished it.

Then he fell to wondering which of the men whose voices he heard across
the public-house would undertake the rem