t though that scientific reason of yours tells you
that Winifred's misfortunes have nothing to do with any curse? what
though your reason tells you that all these calamities may be read as
being the perfectly natural results of perfectly natural causes? Is
the voice of man's puny reason clothed with such authority that it
dares to answer his heart, which knows nothing but that it bleeds?
The terrible facts of the case may be read in two ways. With an
inscrutable symmetry these facts may and do fit in with the universal
theory of the power of the spirit-world to execute a curse from the
grave. Look at that beggar in the street! How dare you ignore the
theory of the sorrowing soul, the logic of the lacerated heart, even
though your reason laughs it to scorn?'

And then at last my laughter would turn to moans, and, replacing the
cross in the cabinet, I would creep hack to my bed ashamed, like a
guilty thing--ashamed before myself.

But the more I felt at my throat the claws of the ancestral ogre
Superstition, the more enraged I became with myself for feeling them
there. And the auger against my ancestors' mysticism grew with the
growing consciousness that I was rapidly yielding to the very same
mysticism myself. And then I would get up again and take from my
escritoire the sheaf of Fenella Stanley's letters which I had brought
from Raxton, and read again those stories about curses, such as that
about the withering of a Romany family under a dead man's curse which
Winnie had described to me that night on the sands.

II

I was delighted to be told by Sleaford, whom I met one afternoon in
Piccadilly, that Cyril had returned to London within the last few
days. 'He is appointed artist-in-chief of the new comic paper, _The
Caricaturist,_ said Sleaford, 'and is in great feather. I have just
been calling upon him.'

'The very man I want to see,' I replied. Sleaford thereupon directed
me to Cyril's studio 'You'll find him at work,' said he, 'doin' a
caricature of Wilderspin's great picture, "Faith and Love." Mother
Gudgeon is sittin' as his model. He does everything from models, you
know.'

'Mother Gudgeon?'

'A female costermonger that he picked up some where in the slums, the
funniest woman in London: haw! haw! I promise you she'll make you
laugh when Cyril draws her out.'

He then began to talk upon the subject which interested him above all
others, the smartness and swiftness of his yacht. 'I am trying to
persuade