no voice of human intonation. How could
he explain them? How account for them save in one way? How defend his
cowardice save on one ground? He shuddered, gazing at the house, and
murmuring now a prayer, and now a word of exorcism. But the day had
come, the sky was red, and the sun was near its rising before he took
courage and dared to cross the threshold.

CHAPTER IX.

MELUSINA.

Even then, with the daylight about him, he crept into the house under a
weight of awe and dread. He left the door ajar that the daylight might
enter with him and dispel the shadows: and when he had crossed the
threshold it was with a pale and frowning face that he advanced to the
middle of the floor, and stood peering round the deserted living-room.
No one was stirring above or below, the house and all within it slept:
the rushlight stand, its wick long extinguished, remained where he had
set it down in the panic of his flight.

With that exception--he eyed it darkly--no trace of the mysterious event
of the night was visible. The room wore, or minute by minute assumed,
its daylight aspect. Nor had he stood long gazing upon it before he
breathed more freely and felt his heart lightened. What was to be
thought, what could be thought in the circumstances, he was not prepared
to say. But the panic of the night was gone with the darkness; and with
it all thought--if in the depths he had really sunk so low--of
relinquishing the woman he loved to the powers of evil.

To the powers of evil! To a fate as much worse than death as the soul
and the mind are higher than the body! Was he really face to face with
that? Was this house, so quiet, so peaceful, so commonplace, in reality
the theatre of one of those manifestations of Satan's power which were
the horror of the age? His senses affirmed it, and yet he doubted. Such
things were, he did not deny it. Few men of the time denied it. But
presented to him, brought within his experience, they shocked him to the
point of disbelief. He found that from the thing which he was prepared
to admit in the general, he dissented fiercely and instinctively in the
particular.

What, the woman he loved! Was he to believe her delivered, soul and
body, to the power of Satan? Never! All that was sane and wholesome and
courageous in the man rebelled against the thought. He would not believe
it. The pots and pans on the hearth, the simple implements of work and
life, on which his eyes alighted wherever he turn