r did, and I doubt I never
shall."

Delavoye laughed in the starlight, but his lips were quivering, and his
eyes were like stars themselves. But I held up my hand: the nightingale
was singing in the wood exactly as when we plunged below the earth.
Somehow it brought us together again, and there we stood listening till
a clock struck twelve in the distant Village.

"''Tis now the very witching time of night,'" said Uvo Delavoye, "'when
church-yards yawn'--like our back garden!" I might have guessed his
favourite play, but his face lit up before my memory. "And shall I tell
you, Gillon, the real name of this whole infernal Hill and Estate? It's
Witching Hill, my man, it's Witching Hill from this night forth!"

And Witching Hill it still remains to me.

CHAPTER II

The House with Red Blinds

Uvo Delavoye had developed a theory to match his name for the Estate.
The baleful spirit of the notorious Lord Mulcaster still brooded over
Witching Hill, and the innocent occupiers of the Queen Anne houses were
one and all liable to the malign influence. Such was the modest
proposition, put as fairly as can be expected of one who resisted it
from the first; for both by temperament and training I was perhaps
unusually proof against this kind of thing. But then I always held that
Delavoye himself did not begin by believing in his own idea, that he
never thought of it before our subterranean adventure, and would have
forgotten all about it but for the house with red blinds.

That vermilion house with the brave blinds of quite another red! I can
still see them bleaching in the glare of those few August days.

It was so hot that the prematurely bronze leaves of the horse-chestnuts,
behind the odd numbers in Mulcaster Park, were as crisp as tinfoil,
while a tawny stubble defied the garden rollers of those tenants who had
not been driven to the real country or the seaside. Half our inhabited
houses were either locked up empty, or in the hands of servants who
spent their time gossiping at the gate. And I personally was not
surprised when the red blinds stayed down in their turn.

The Abercromby Royles were a young couple who might be expected to
mobilise at short notice, in spite of the wife's poor health, for they
had no other ties. The mere fact of their departure on Bank Holiday,
when the rest of the Estate were on the river, meant no more to me than
a sudden whim on the lady's part; but then I never liked the looks of
h