my heart giving a leap of terror lest there should be a reply.  Why this should have been I cannot tell, but I had a feeling that if there was an answer it would be more than I could bear.  But there was no answer; the moaning went on, and then, as if it had been real, the voice rose a little higher again, the words recommenced, “Oh, mother, let me in! oh, mother, let me in!” with an expression that was heart-breaking to hear.

As if it had been real!  What do I mean by that?  I suppose I got less alarmed as the thing went on.  I began to recover the use of my senses,—­I seemed to explain it all to myself by saying that this had once happened, that it was a recollection of a real scene.  Why there should have seemed something quite satisfactory and composing in this explanation I cannot tell, but so it was.  I began to listen almost as if it had been a play, forgetting Bagley, who, I almost think, had fainted, leaning against the wall.  I was startled out of this strange spectatorship that had fallen upon me by the sudden rush of something which made my heart jump once more, a large black figure in the door-way waving its arms.  “Come in! come in! come in!” it shouted out hoarsely at the top of a deep bass voice, and then poor Bagley fell down senseless across the threshold.  He was less sophisticated than I,—­he had not been able to bear it any longer.  I took him for something supernatural, as he took me, and it was some time before I awoke to the necessities of the moment.  I remembered only after, that from the time I began to give my attention to the man, I heard the other voice no more.  It was some time before I brought him to.  It must have been a strange scene:  the lantern making a luminous spot in the darkness, the man’s white face lying on the black earth, I over him, doing what I could for him, probably I should have been thought to be murdering him had any one seen us.  When at last I succeeded in pouring a little brandy down his throat, he sat up and looked about him wildly.  “What’s up?” he said; then recognizing me, tried to struggle to his feet with a faint “Beg your pardon, Colonel.”  I got him home as best I could, making him lean upon my arm.  The great fellow was as weak as a child.  Fortunately he did not for some time remember what had happened.  From the time Bagley fell the voice had stopped, and all was still.

* * * * *

“You’ve got an epidemic in your house, Colonel,” Simson said to me next morning.  “What’s the meaning of it all?  Here’s your butler raving about a voice.  This will never do, you know; and so far as I can make out, you are in it too.”

“Yes, I am in it, Doctor.  I thought I had better speak to you.  Of course you are treating Roland all right, but the boy is not raving, he is as sane as you or me.  It’s all true.”

“As sane as—­I—­or you.  I never thought the boy insane.  He’s got cerebral excitement, fever.  I don’t know what you’ve got.  There’s something very queer about the look of your eyes.”