her batch of tales. There was simply no end
to it all."

"Most distressing and annoying, I can well believe," interposed the
doctor.

"Then suddenly, the phenomena ceased as mysteriously as they had begun,
and the interest flagged. The tales stopped. People got interested in
something else. It all seemed to die out. This was last July. I can tell
you exactly, for I've kept a diary more or less of what happened."

"Ah!"

"But now, quite recently, within the past three weeks, it has all
revived again with a rush--with a kind of furious attack, so to speak.
It has really become unbearable. You may imagine what it means, and the
general state of affairs, when I say that the possibility of leaving has
occurred to me."

"Incendiarism?" suggested Dr. Silence, half under his breath, but not so
low that Colonel Wragge did not hear him.

"By Jove, sir, you take the very words out of my mouth!" exclaimed the
astonished man, glancing from the doctor to me and from me to the
doctor, and rattling the money in his pocket as though some explanation
of my friend's divining powers were to be found that way.

"It's only that you are thinking very vividly," the doctor said quietly,
"and your thoughts form pictures in my mind before you utter them. It's
merely a little elementary thought-reading."

His intention, I saw, was not to perplex the good man, but to impress
him with his powers so as to ensure obedience later.

"Good Lord! I had no idea--" He did not finish the sentence, and
dived again abruptly into his narrative.

"I did not see anything myself, I must admit, but the stories of
independent eye-witnesses were to the effect that lines of light, like
streams of thin fire, moved through the wood and sometimes were seen to
shoot out precisely as flames might shoot out--in the direction of this
house. There," he explained, in a louder voice that made me jump,
pointing with a thick finger to the map, "where the westerly fringe of
the plantation comes up to the end of the lower lawn at the back of the
house--where it links on to those dark patches, which are laurel
shrubberies, running right up to the back premises--that's where these
lights were seen. They passed from the wood to the shrubberies, and in
this way reached the house itself. Like silent rockets, one man
described them, rapid as lightning and exceedingly bright."

"And this evidence you spoke of?"

"They actually reached the sides of the house. They've left a