is mind was deranged. There was no
undue vehemence in his voice or his manner. He spoke with a melancholy
resignation--he seemed like a prisoner submitting to a sentence that
he had deserved. Remembering the cases of men suffering from nervous
disease who had been haunted by apparitions, I asked if he saw any
imaginary figure under the form of a boy.

"I see nothing," he said; "I only hear. Look yourself. It is in the last
degree improbable--but let us make sure that nobody has followed me from
Boulogne, and is playing me a trick."

We made the circuit of the Belvidere. On its eastward side the house
wall was built against one of the towers of the old Abbey. On the
westward side, the ground sloped steeply down to a deep pool or tarn.
Northward and southward, there was nothing to be seen but the open moor.
Look where I might, with the moonlight to make the view plain to me, the
solitude was as void of any living creature as if we had been surrounded
by the awful dead world of the moon.

"Was it the boy's voice that you heard on the voyage across the
Channel?" I asked.

"Yes, I heard it for the first time--down in the engine-room; rising and
falling, rising and falling, like the sound of the engines themselves."

"And when did you hear it again?"

"I feared to hear it in London. It left me, I should have told you, when
we stepped ashore out of the steamboat. I was afraid that the noise of
the traffic in the streets might bring it back to me. As you know, I
passed a quiet night. I had the hope that my imagination had deceived
me--that I was the victim of a delusion, as people say. It is no
delusion. In the perfect tranquillity of this place the voice has come
back to me. While we were at table I heard it again--behind me, in the
library. I heard it still, when the door was shut. I ran up here to try
if it would follow me into the open air. It _has_ followed me. We may as
well go down again into the hall. I know now that there is no escaping
from it. My dear old home has become horrible to me. Do you mind
returning to London tomorrow?"

What I felt and feared in this miserable state of things matters little.
The one chance I could see for Romayne was to obtain the best medical
advice. I sincerely encouraged his idea of going back to London the next
day.

We had sat together by the hall fire for about ten minutes, when he took
out his handkerchief, and wiped away the perspiration from his forehead,
drawing a deep b