been instrumental in both these disasters.  The engine-driver, who said he was “dazed,” and the steersman, who attributed his mistake at the wheel to the interference of some unknown outsider—­were not these things an indication that my dreadful suspicion was well grounded?  And if so, to what frightful malignity did they not point!  Here was a spirit, which in order to appease the pangs of a supernatural jealousy, was ready to use its immaterial powers to destroy scores of people against whom it could not possibly have any grudge.  The most fanatical anarchism is not worse than this.

Those attempts had failed.  But now the aspect of affairs was changed.  The ghost of Lord Clarenceux had more power over me now—­I felt that acutely; and I explained it by the fact that I was in the near neighborhood of Rosa.  It was only when she was near that the jealous hate of this spectre exercised its full efficacy.

In such wise did I reason the matter out to myself.  But reasoning was quite unnecessary.  I knew by a sure instinct.  All the dark thoughts of the ghost had passed into my brain, and if they had been transcribed in words of fire and burnt upon my retina, I could not have been more certain of their exact import.

As I sat in my room at the hotel that night I speculated morosely upon my plight and upon the future.  Had a man ever been so situated before?  Well, probably so.  We go about in a world where secret influences are continually at work for us or against us, and we do not suspect their existence, because we have no imagination.  For it needs imagination to perceive the truth—­that is why the greatest poets are always the greatest teachers.

As for you who are disposed to smile at the idea of a live man crushed (figuratively) under the heel of a ghost, I beg you to look back upon your own experience, and count up the happenings which have struck you as mysterious.  You will be astonished at their number.  But nothing is so mysterious that it is incapable of explanation, did we but know enough.  I, by a singular mischance, was put in the way of the nameless knowledge which explains all.  At any rate, I was made acquainted with some trifle of it.  I had strayed on the seashore of the unknown, and picked up a pebble.  I had a glimpse of that other world which permeates and exists side by side with and permeates our own.

Just now I used the phrase “under the heel of a ghost,” and I used it advisedly.  It indicates pretty well my mental condition.  I was cowed, mastered.  The ghost of Clarenceux, driven to extremities by the brief scene of tenderness which had passed in Rosa’s drawing-room, had determined by his own fell method to end the relations between Rosa and myself.  And his method was to assume a complete sway over me, the object of his hatred.