r a number of things
which she had been waiting for just such an auspicious occasion to
confide.

But the larches were noisy and cried out with wild voices, and the flame
of the fire grew blue and swirled about in the draught sinuously, so
that a chill crept upon the two. Something cold appeared to envelop
them--such a chill as pleasure voyagers feel when a berg steals beyond
Newfoundland and glows blue and threatening upon their ocean path.

Then came something else which was not cold, but hot as the flames of
hell--and they saw red, and stared at each other with maddened eyes, and
then ran together from the room and clasped in close embrace safe beyond
the fatal place, and thanked God they had not done the thing that they
dared not speak of--the thing which suddenly came to them to do.

So they called it the room of the Evil Thought. They could not account
for it. They avoided the thought of it, being healthy and happy folk.
But none entered it more. The door was locked.

One day, Hal, reading the paper, came across a paragraph concerning the
young minister who had once lived there, and who had thought and
written there and so influenced the lives of those about him that they
remembered him even while they disapproved.

"He cut a man's throat on board ship for Australia," said he, "and then
he cut his own, without fatal effect--and jumped overboard, and so ended
it. What a strange thing!"

Then they all looked at one another with subtle looks, and a shadow fell
upon them and stayed the blood at their hearts.

The next week the room of the Evil Thought was pulled down to make way
for a pansy bed, which is quite gay and innocent, and blooms all the
better because the larches, with their eternal murmuring, have been laid
low and carted away to the sawmill.

STORY OF THE VANISHING PATIENT

THERE had always been strange stories about the house, but it was a
sensible, comfortable sort of a neighborhood, and people took pains to
say to one another that there was nothing in these tales--of course
not! Absolutely nothing! How could there be? It was a matter of common
remark, however, that considering the amount of money the Nethertons had
spent on the place, it was curious they lived there so little. They
were nearly always away,--up North in the summer and down South in the
winter, and over to Paris or London now and then,--and when they did
come home it was only to entertain a number of guests from the city