room said.

"Did you learn anything back there, Hartley?" Katherine asked.

"It wasn't the servants," he said. "Jenkins heard the crying. He's
certain it came from outside the house."

Paredes looked up.

"Extraordinary!" he said.

"I wish I had heard it," Doctor Groom grumbled.

Paredes laughed.

"Thank the good Lord I didn't. Perpetually, Bobby, your house reminds me
that I've nerves sensitive to the unknown world. I will go further than
the doctor. I will say that this house _is_ crowded with the
supernatural. It shelters things that we cannot understand, that we will
never understand. When I was a child in Panama I had a nurse who,
unfortunately, developed too strongly my native superstition. How she
frightened me with her bedtime stories! They were all of men murdered or
dead of fevers, crossing the trail, or building the railroad, or digging
insufficient ditches for De Lesseps. Some of her best went farther back
than that. They were thick with the ghosts of old Spaniards and the
crimson hands of Morgan's buccaneers. Really that tiny strip across the
isthmus is crowded with souls snatched too quickly from torn and tortured
bodies. If you are sensitive you feel they are still there."

"What has all this to do with the Cedars?" Doctor Groom grumbled.

"It explains my ability to sense strange elements in this old house.
There are in Panama--if you don't mind, doctor--improvised graveyards,
tangled by the jungle, that give you a feeling of an active, unseen
population precisely as this house does."

He arose and strolled with a cat-like lack of sound about the hall. When
he spoke again his voice was scarcely audible. It was the voice of a man
who thinks aloud, and the doctor failed to interrupt him again.

"I have felt less spiritually alarmed in those places of grinning
skulls, which always seem trying to recite agonies beyond expression,
than I feel in this house. For here the woods are more desolate than the
jungle, and the walls of houses as old as this make a prison for
suffering."

A vague discomfort stole through Bobby's surprise. He had never heard
Paredes speak so seriously. In spite of the man's unruffled manner there
was nothing of mockery about his words. What, then, was their intention?

Paredes said no more, but for several minutes he paced up and down the
hall, glancing often with languid eyes toward the stairs. He had the
appearance of one who expects and waits.

Katherine, Graham, and