shirt-sleeves,—­went into his house, out into the road, and then up to the door of his neighbor.  There he rang the bell and knocked.  A maid came.  “Is your master in?” he asked.  “Yes, sir, he’s sitting in the summer-house at the end of the garden.”  “How long’s he been there?” “About half an hour, sir, as near as I can reckon.”  “Could I see him?” “Certainly, sir.”  “Perhaps you’d—­perhaps you’d show me to the summer-house.”  “Yes, sir.”

Mr. Jenkins-Smith and the maid went to the end of the garden, and there, in the summer-house, they found the corpse of a suicide hanging from a beam in the roof.

This was the ugly story which had come into Rosamund’s mind as she stood by the seat close to the garden wall.  On the other side of Mr. Jenkins-Smith’s wall had been the summer-house of his neighbor; on the other side of her wall there was the Dark Entry.  She stood considering this fact and thinking of the man’s terror in his garden.  He had been subject surely to an emanation.  A mysterious message had been sent to him by the corpse which dangled from the beam on the other side of the wall.

She went nearer to the wall of the garden and listened attentively.  Had she not heard a sound in the Dark Entry?  It seemed to her that some one had come into the stone corridor while she had been walking up and down on the path, and was now standing there motionless.  But how very unlikely it was that any one would do such a thing!  It must be quite black there now, and very cold on the stone pavement, between the stone walls, under the roof of stone.  Of course no one was there.

Nevertheless she went on listening with a sort of painful attention.  And distress came upon her.  It began in a sort of physical malaise out of which a mental dread, such as she had never yet experienced, was born.  She felt now quite certain that some one was standing still in the Dark Entry, very close to her, but separated from her by two walls of brick and stone; and something of this unseen person, of his attention, or his anger, or his terror, or his criminal intent, in any case something tremendously powerful, pierced the walls and came upon her and enveloped her.  She opened her lips, not knowing what she was going to say, and from them came the cry: 

“Dion!”

Silence followed her cry.

“Dion!  Dion!” she called again.

Immediately after the third cry she heard a slow step on the stones of the Dark Entry, passing close to her but muffled by the intervening walls.  It went on very slowly indeed; it was a dragging footfall; the sound of it presently died away.

Then she sat down on the bench close to the wall.  She still felt distressed, even afraid.  Whoever it was—­that loiterer in the Dark Entry—­he had left the corridor by the archway near Little Cloisters; he had not gone into the Green Court.

She sat waiting in the darkness.

* * * * *