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 the doctor, Bobby could see, had been made as uneasy as himself by the change in the Panamanian.  The doctor cleared his throat.  His voice broke the silence tentatively: 

“If this house makes you so unhappy, young man, why do you stay?”

Paredes paused in his walk.  His thin lips twitched.  He indicated Bobby.

“For the sake of my very good friend.  What are a man’s personal fears and desires if he can help his friends?”

Graham’s distaste was evident.  Paredes recognized it with a smile.  Bobby watched him curiously, realizing more and more that Graham was right to this extent:  they must somehow learn the real purpose of the Panamanian’s continued presence here.