with the shadows,
unsubstantial and shapeless. Bobby grasped one of the bed posts and
braced himself, listening. The candle in Graham's hand commenced to
flicker again, and Bobby knew that it hadn't been his fancy, for Graham
listened, too.

It shook again through the heavy, oppressive night, merely accentuated
by the candle--a faint ululation barely detaching itself from silence,
straying after a time into the silence again. At first it was like the
grief of a woman heard at a great distance. But the sound, while it
gained no strength, forced on them more and more an abhorrent sense of
intimacy. This crying from an infinite distance filled the room,
seemed finally to have its source in the room itself. After it had
sobbed thinly into nothing, its pulsations continued to sigh in
Bobby's ears. They seemed timed to the renewed and eccentric dancing
of the amorphous shadows.

Graham straightened and placed the candle on the bureau. He seemed
more startled than he had been at the unbelievable secretiveness of
a dead man.

"You heard it?" Bobby breathed.

Graham nodded.

"What was it? Where did you think it came from?" Bobby demanded. "It was
like someone mourning for this--this poor devil."

Graham couldn't disguise his effort to elude the sombre spell of the
room, to drive from his brain the illusion of that unearthly moaning.

"It must have come from outside the house," he answered "There's no use
giving way to fancies where there's a possible explanation. It must have
come from outside--from some woman in great agony of mind."

Bobby recalled his perception of a woman moving with a curious absence of
sound about the edges of the stagnant lake. He spoke of it to Graham.

"I couldn't be sure it was a woman, but there's no house within two
miles. What would a woman be doing wandering around the Cedars?"

"At any rate, there are three women in the house," Graham said,
"Katherine and the two servants, Ella and Jane. The maids are badly
frightened. It may have come from the servants' quarters. It must have
been one of them."

But Bobby saw that Graham didn't believe either of the maids had released
that poignant suffering.

"It didn't sound like a living voice," he said simply.

"Then how are we to take it?" Graham persisted angrily. "I shall question
Katherine and the two maids."

He took up the candle with a stubborn effort to recapture his old
forcefulness, but as they left the room the shadows thronged th