en sitting there with pipes in your mouths, the amazing sensation I
experienced of holding an intangible, impalpable thing so closely to my
heart that it touched my body with equal pressure all the way down, and
then melted away somewhere into my very being? For it was like seizing a
rush of cool wind and feeling a touch of burning fire the moment it had
struck its swift blow and passed on. A series of shocks ran all over and
all through me; a momentary ecstasy of flaming sweetness and wonder
thrilled down into me; my heart gave another great leap--and then I was
alone.

"The room was empty. I turned on the gas and struck a match to prove it.
All fear had left me, and something was singing round me in the air and
in my heart like the joy of a spring morning in youth. Not all the
devils or shadows or hauntings in the world could then have caused me a
single tremor.

"I unlocked the door and went all over the dark house, even into kitchen
and cellar and up among the ghostly attics. But the house was empty.
Something had left it. I lingered a short hour, analyzing, thinking,
wondering--you can guess what and how, perhaps, but I won't detail, for
I promised only essentials, remember--and then went out to sleep the
remainder of the night in my own flat, locking the door behind me upon a
house no longer haunted.

"But my uncle, Sir Henry, the owner of the house, required an account of
my adventure, and of course I was in duty bound to give him some kind of
a true story. Before I could begin, however, he held up his hand to stop
me.

"'First,' he said, 'I wish to tell you a little deception I ventured to
practice on you. So many people have been to that house and seen the
ghost that I came to think the story acted on their imaginations, and
I wished to make a better test. So I invented for their benefit another
story, with the idea that if you did see anything I could be sure it was
not due merely to an excited imagination.'

"'Then what you told me about a woman having been murdered, and all
that, was not the true story of the haunting?'

"'It was not. The true story is that a cousin of mine went mad in that
house, and killed himself in a fit of morbid terror following upon years
of miserable hypochondriasis. It is his figure that investigators see.'

"'That explains, then,' I gasped----

"'Explains what?'

"I thought of that poor struggling soul, longing all these years for
escape, and determined to keep my story