“That’s the best plan,” Paredes agreed.

But they had scarcely turned the corner of the house, beyond reach of the glow, when Paredes rejoined them.  His feet were no longer careful in the underbrush.  He came up running.  For the first time in their acquaintance Bobby detected a lessening of the man’s suave, unemotional habit.

“The light!” the Panamanian gasped.  “It’s gone!  Before I could get close it faded out.”

Bobby called to the doctor and ran toward the door at the rear.  It was unhinged and half open as it had been when he had awakened to his painful and inexplicable predicament.  He went through, fumbling in his pocket for matches.  The damp chill of the hall nauseated him as it had done before, seemed to place about his throat an intangible band that made breathing difficult.  Before he could get his match safe out the doctor had struck a wax vesta.  Its strong flame played across the dingy, streaked walls.

“There’s a flashlight, Carlos,” Bobby said, “in the door flap of the automobile.”

Paredes started across the yard with a haste, it seemed to Bobby, almost eager.

Striking matches as they went, the doctor and Bobby hurried to the front of the house.  The rooms appeared undisturbed in their decay.  The shutters were closed.  The front door was barred.  The broken walls from which the plaster hung in shreds leered at them.

Suddenly Bobby turned, grasping the doctor’s arm.

“Did you hear anything?”

The doctor shook his head.

“Or feel anything?”

“No.”

“I thought,” Bobby said excitedly, “that there was some one in the hall.  I—­I simply got that impression, for I saw nothing myself.  My back was turned.”

Paredes strolled silently in.

“It may have been Mr. Paredes,” the doctor said.

But Bobby wasn’t convinced.

“Did you see or hear anything coming through the hall, Carlos?”

“No,” Paredes said.

He had brought the light.  With its help they explored the tiny cellar and the upper floor.  There was no sign of a recent occupancy.  Everything was as Bobby had found it on awakening.  A vagrant wind sighed about the place.  They looked at each other with startled eyes.  They filed out with an incongruous stealth.

“Then there are ghosts here, too!” Paredes whispered.

“Who knows?” Doctor Groom mused.  “It is as puzzling as anything that has happened at the Cedars unless the light we saw was some phosphorescent effect of decaying wood or vegetation.”

“Then why should it go out all at once?” Bobby asked.  “Is there any connection between this light and what has happened at the Cedars?”

“The house at least,” Paredes put in, “is connected with what has happened at the Cedars through your experience here.”

At Doctor Groom’s suggestion they sat in the automobile for some time, watching the house for a repetition of the pallid light.  After several minutes, when it failed to come, Bobby set his gears.