here was the sand-shaker
on the maple desk; there hung the yellowed print of the "Last Supper"
above the fireplace--all stark and ghostly in that uncannily late
afternoon light, which not even the morning sun could dispel.

He clutched her hand. He looked at the bed, which hadn't been smoothed
or touched since he had lain in it a month ago. He remembered it
as uncomprehendingly as one remembers mislaying a lost object in a
forgotten place. He remembered waking. But the rest he had done was
lost in the shadows.

"So this is where it happened--_here!_ How have I ever been in this room
before?"

"_What_ happened?" she asked him eagerly, firmly.

"I fainted--before I was sick. But why--why here?" he begged.

She had prepared her answer; she had many times rehearsed it; but the
words now served inadequately.

"You hadn't eaten anything," she stated softly. "You hadn't slept. You
had a fever, and your brain was so tired from--from everything that when
you started for _your_ room,--the one opposite, which I had shown to
you,--you carelessly turned to the right, and came into this room
instead, which I hadn't had a chance yet to tell you about. Haven't
you ever known, _since_, that you did it?"

He shook his head.

"This was Mrs. Eberdeen's room," she went on. "It has always been
just like this,--at least I think it has,--always, since the house was
built. I kept it as a curiosity. I called it Mrs. Eberdeen's room
because the natives said she was wicked and had brought ruin to the
house. I reasoned that this was why nobody had taken these things away
or changed them--the wall-paper, I mean, the bed, the carpet, the
pictures. And there's precisely one thing," she impetuously concluded,
as if she couldn't postpone longer telling him, "that I myself have
added."

Hastings smiled wanly at her. She guided him round to the wall at the
side of the door in front of which they had been standing; she started
to speak again before she saw what it was to which she had referred; and
so her own words prevented her from hearing the smothered sound of his
recognition.

"I found this," she said, trying to speak carelessly and forcing herself
steadfastly to regard it, "in an old shop twelve miles down the Poochuck
Road. Isn't it quaint? I got it--because, Jack, it looked like you,
and--and because it exactly fitted this panel!"

But her attempted gaiety sank dismally in the silence which followed.
They just stood there. The minute