wagging his tail
more briskly. He collided first with a chair, and then ran straight into
a table. Smoke trotted close at his side, trying his very best to guide
him. But it was useless. Dr. Silence had to lift him up into his own
arms and carry him like a baby. For he was blind.

III

It was a week later when John Silence called to see the author in his
new house, and found him well on the way to recovery and already busy
again with his writing. The haunted look had left his eyes, and he
seemed cheerful and confident.

"Humour restored?" laughed the doctor, as soon as they were comfortably
settled in the room overlooking the Park.

"I've had no trouble since I left that dreadful place," returned Pender
gratefully; "and thanks to you--"

The doctor stopped him with a gesture.

"Never mind that," he said, "we'll discuss your new plans afterwards,
and my scheme for relieving you of the house and helping you settle
elsewhere. Of course it must be pulled down, for it's not fit for any
sensitive person to live in, and any other tenant might be afflicted in
the same way you were. Although, personally, I think the evil has
exhausted itself by now."

He told the astonished author something of his experiences in it with
the animals.

"I don't pretend to understand," Pender said, when the account was
finished, "but I and my wife are intensely relieved to be free of it
all. Only I must say I should like to know something of the former
history of the house. When we took it six months ago I heard no word
against it."

Dr. Silence drew a typewritten paper from his pocket.

"I can satisfy your curiosity to some extent," he said, running his eye
over the sheets, and then replacing them in his coat; "for by my
secretary's investigations I have been able to check certain information
obtained in the hypnotic trance by a 'sensitive' who helps me in such
cases. The former occupant who haunted you appears to have been a woman
of singularly atrocious life and character who finally suffered death by
hanging, after a series of crimes that appalled the whole of England and
only came to light by the merest chance. She came to her end in the year
1798, for it was not this particular house she lived in, but a much
larger one that then stood upon the site it now occupies, and was then,
of course, not in London, but in the country. She was a person of
intellect, possessed of a powerful, trained will, and of consummate
audacity, and I