XIII

He rose with the ludicrous alacrity of a man who had taken a public
and awkward misstep. The wan lamplight, diffused from within, made
just visible the bulk that had descended with him. It lay without
motion, sprawling upon a lower step and the floor. John Woolfolk moved
backward from it, his hand behind him, feeling for the entrance to the
lighted room. He shifted his feet carefully, for the darkness was
wheeling about him in visible black rings streaked with pale orange as
he passed into the room.

Here objects, dimensions, became normally placed, recognizable. He saw
the mezzotint with its sere and sunny peace, the portfolios on their
stands, like grotesque and flattened quadrupeds, and Lichfield Stope
on the floor, still hiding his dead face in the crook of his arm.

He saw these things, remembered them, and yet now they had new
significance--they oozed a sort of vital horror, they seemed to crawl
with a malignant and repulsive life. The entire room was charged with
this palpable, sentient evil. John Woolfolk defiantly faced the still,
cold inclosure; he was conscious of an unseen scrutiny, of a menace
that lived in pictures, moved the fingers of the dead, and that could
take actual bulk and pound his heart sore.

He was not afraid of the wrongness that inhabited this muck of house
and grove and matted bush. He said this loudly to the prostrate form;
then, waiting a little, repeated it. He would smash the print with its
fallacious expanse of peace. The broken glass of the smitten picture
jingled thinly on the floor. Woolfolk turned suddenly and defeated the
purpose of whatever had been stealthily behind him; anyway it had
disappeared. He stood in a strained attitude, listening to the
aberrations of the wind without, when an actual presence slipped by
him, stopping in the middle of the floor.

It was Millie Stope. Her eyes were opened to their widest extent, but
they had the peculiar blank fixity of the eyes of the blind. Above
them her hair slipped and slid in a loosened knot.

"I had to walk round him," she protested in a low, fluctuating voice,
"there was no other way.... Right by his head. My skirt----" She broke
off and, shuddering, came close to John Woolfolk. "I think we'd better
go away," she told him, nodding. "It's quite impossible here, with him
in the hall, where you have to pass so close."

Woolfolk drew back from her. She too was a part of the house; she had
led him there--a white flame