dead Desire
Michell to you?"

A strange and solemn hush followed my question. The words seemed to take
a significance and importance beyond their simple meaning. The hand I
held trembled in my clasp. She answered at last, just audibly:

"You know. You said that you had read her book."

"But the book tells so little, Desire. Just such a chronicle of
superstition as may be found in a hundred old records."

She shook her head slightly.

"Not that! Bring me the book."

The book was upstairs in the room from which I had carried her half an
hour before in something very like a panic flight. Before I could
release her hand and rise, before I comprehended his intention, Vere was
out of the living room and upon the stairs. It was too late to overtake
him. The man who had been a professional skater covered the stairs in a
few easy, swinging strides. We heard his light tread on the floor
overhead, heard him stop beside the table where the book lay. Then, he
was returning. My door closed. His step sounded on the stairs again; in
a moment he was back among us, and quietly offering the volume to our
guest. His dark eyes met mine reassuringly, deprecating the thoughts I
am sure my face expressed.

"Lights burning and all serene up there," he announced.

Desire touched the book with a curious repugnance.

"I was looking for this, the first night I came here," she murmured.
"That is why I came to America after my father died. I had promised him
to destroy this record. When I heard that the house was sold to a
gentleman from New York, I came down from the convent on the hill to
find the bookcase holding the old history. I did not know anyone was
here, that night, until you touched my hair."

I remembered the bookcase near the bed, where I stood my candle and
matches. Unaware, I had prevented her finding the thing she sought, and
so forced her to return. Afterward, the house had been full of workmen
making alterations and improvements, until later still Phillida had
transferred the bookcase and its contents to her sewing room. If I had
not taken the whim to sleep in the old house on the night of my
purchase, or if I had chosen another room, the existence of Desire
Michell might never have been known to me.

Would the creature from the Barrier have appeared to me, if I had not
known her?

She was drawing something from behind the portrait of the first Desire
Michell; a thin, small book that had lain concealed between the co