dearer than his own.

Kathleen lay asleep in that room--he fancied he could hear her
breathing; and, by the hospital on the hill, up beyond the point of
pines, in a little cottage which he could see from the great window, lay
Rosalie with sleepless eyes and wan cheeks, longing for morning and the
stir of life to help her to forget.

For Rosalie he had come to this house once more. For her sake he was
revisiting this torture-chamber, from which he knew he must go again,
blanched and shaken, as a man goes from a tomb where his dead lie
unforgiving.

He shut his teeth, went swiftly across the room, and beside a great
carved oak table touched a hidden spring in the side of it. The spring
snapped; the panel creaked a little and drew back. It seemed to him that
the noise he made must be heard in every part of the house, so sensitive
was his ear, so deep was the silence on which the sounds had broken. He
turned round to the doorway to listen before he put his hand within the
secret place.

There was no sound. He turned his attention to the table. Drawing forth
two packets with a gasp of relief, he put them in his pocket, and, with
extreme care, proceeded to close the panel. By rubbing the edges of the
wood with grease from a candle on the table, he was able to readjust
the panel in silence. But, as the spring came home, he became suddenly
conscious of a presence in the room. A shiver passed through him.
He turned round-softly, quickly. He was in the shadow and near great
window-curtains, and his fingers instinctively clutched them as he saw
a figure in white at the door of the room. Slowly, strangely deliberate,
the figure moved further into the room.

Charley's breath stopped. He felt his face flush, and a strange weakness
came on him. There before him stood Kathleen.

She was in her night-gown, and she stood still, as though listening;
yet, as Charley looked closer, he realised that it was an unconscious,
passive listening, and that she did not know he was there.

Her mind only was listening. She was asleep. Was it possible that his
very presence in the house had touched some old note of memory,
which, automatically responding, had carried her from her bed in this
somnambulistic trance? That subtle telegraphy between our subconscious
selves which we cannot reduce to a law, yet alarming us at times,
announced to Kathleen's mind, independent of the waking senses, the
presence once familiar to this house for so many yea