The path up to the house was lightly barred by the wild vine, that, climbing on overgrown shrubs on either side, had more than once cast its tendrils across.  A trodden path there was in and out the bushes, although not the straight original one, and by following it Alec gained the open space before the house.  Here self-sown magenta petunias made banks of colour against the old brick walls, and the evening light, just turning rosy, fell thereon.  He could not see the river, although he heard it flowing behind a further mass of bushes.  He stood alone with the old house in the opening that was enclosed by shrubs and trees so full of leaf that they looked like giant heaps of leaves, and it seemed to him that, if earth might have an enchanted place, he had surely entered it.  Then, remembering that the light would not last long, he fitted the key to the door and went in.

Outside, nature had done her work, but inside the ugly wall-paper and turned bannisters of a modern villa had not been much beautified by dust and neglect.  Still, there is something in the atmosphere of a long neglect that to the mind, if not to the eye, has softening effect.  Alec listened a moment, as it were, to the silence and loneliness of the house, and went into the first dark room.

It was a large room, probably a parlour of some pretension, but the only light came through the door and lit it very faintly.  All the windows of the house were shut with wooden shutters, and Alec, not being aware that, except in the rooms Harkness had occupied, the shutters were nailed, went to a window to open it.  He fumbled with the hasp, and, concluding that he did not understand its working, went on into the next room to see if the window there was to be more easily managed.  In this next room he was in almost total darkness.  He had not reached the window before he heard some one moving in an adjoining room.  Turning, he saw a door outlined by cracks of lamplight, and as it was apparent that some one else was in the house, he made at once for this door.  Before he had reached it the cracks of light which guided him were gone; and when he had opened it, the room on whose threshold he stood was dark and silent; yet, whether by some slight sounds, or by some subtler sense for which we have no name, he was convinced that there was some one in it.  Indignant at the extinction of the light and at the silence, he turned energetically again in the direction of the window in order to wrench it open, when, hearing a slight scratching sound, he looked back into the inner room.  There was light there again, but only a small vaporous curl of light.  Connecting this with the sound, he supposed that a poor sulphur match had been struck; but this supposition perhaps came to him later, for at the moment he was dazed by seeing in this small light the same face he had seen over old Cameron’s coffin.  The sight he had had of it then had almost faded from his memory; he had put it from him as a thing improbable,