“You may stagger me,” said I, “but never can convince me that you are not having a nice game played off upon you, something similar to your own; only in place of duplicates, I fear there are triplicates.  Why might not Gourlay have been aware of the fact you think only known to yourself?”

“And yet have shot himself as a ruined gambler?”

“Certainly it is more probable,” said I, somewhat caught, “that he would have insisted upon your repaying him, under the threat of exposure.  Yet one does not know what a man may do or not do, even if we knew the circumstances.  Two doves will not pick up for their nests a straw each of the same shape.  But I believe it is now settled, that no case of mystery has ever happened, or can be supposed by the most ingenious imagination, where the chances are more for supernatural agency than for human ingenuity or chance.  The latter I put away out of your case, though the marvels of coincidence are stranger than fiction.  Every one of us has a little record within his heart of such experiences.  I have been startled by a coincidence into a five minutes’ belief in supernatural agency.  One opens a book of six hundred pages, and catches, on the instant, the passage for which he looked the whole day before.  An actor dies in ranting ‘there is another and a better world.’  A soldier is saved from the punishment of death for sleeping on his post, by the fact of having been able to say that St. Paul’s on a certain night struck thirteen, which it never did before.  Andrew Gordon, the miser, drew a prize of twenty thousand pounds for the number 2001, which he dreamed of the night previous he bought the ticket.  A shepherd was the discoverer of the Australian diggings, by having taken up a piece of what he considered quartz to throw at his dog called Goldy.  Human history is full of such things; but, marvellous as they are, they are not more so than the ways by which man manufactures mysteries, and gets them believed as the work of Heaven.  As to that illuminated figure I saw in the wood”——­

My speech was interrupted by a strange sound from the other end of the house.  Graeme started to his feet.  It was not one of pain coming from a sick-room, but rather one of surprise, and there seemed a bustle among the servants.  The door opened, and a woman’s face, with two wild staring eyes, looked in.  “Come here, sir,” she cried, and disappeared upon the instant.

“Something more,” ejaculated Graeme, as he hurried away.  I was allowed no time for an absurd monologue.  Graeme was not absent many minutes, when he hurried in as he had hurried out, but his face was not that which he took with him, braced up into surprise and fear, as that was.  He was now as pale as death’s pale horse, and nearly as furious.  His eye beamed an unnatural light—­his breathing was quick and snatchy, as if every inspiration and expiration pained the lungs.  He seemed to wish some one to bind him with ropes, that he might escape the vibrations of his muscles, and be steadied to be able to speak.