ant rains had done serious damage in the cemetery. Dripping
from the drenching he had received in his tour of inspection, his boots
muddy, and his hands dirty from holding to the precarious bushes, he
shook with cold as he reported on what he had found. In his narrative he
had quite forgotten the presence of Martha who sat by, silent and
waxen-faced.

"And you ought to see," he said, turning to his wife, "how the rain has
run down those graves. You know, it's loosened Jim Sloan's stone so, I'm
afraid it'll fall against the first heavy blow."

Martha's exclamation "Oh!" recalled to him her presence. He stopped
talking for a while, then hoping to blot out the effects of his
statement he began a lively story of the number of trees that had fallen
across the road, and how he had been told that over at Rampaco the
post-office had been struck by lightning.

He did not know it, but Martha was deaf to his reports. She had her own
thoughts. She felt herself curiously strong of will, and there raced in
her blood the high determination to act that very night. Not for nothing
had she spent the rain drenched days in terrified silence in her room.
All of her energies that were still capable of being mustered to her
resolve, she had converted in the crucible of her will, and huddled in
terror, she had forged the determination to go out when the time came
and to cut herself free of the fiendish power that was searing her mind
and slowly crushing her. She remembered that in her faint, when she lay
limp and inert, a thing of dread, she had felt herself crumple up at the
touch of Jim--Jim reaching out to her. Now she would cut herself free of
him at the very source of his power over her. She would go that very
night.

She cast a glance toward the closet where Deems kept his trowel and
chisel. She would have need of them, she knew. She said "Good night"
rather more loudly and vehemently than she had intended, for she was
feeling nervous.

She was awakened by a feeling of cold. As she sat up she saw that the
door was open. What was it drew her eyes through the hallway and out
into the open and brought her up suddenly? There came upon her an
eeriness that startled and chilled her, and suddenly, as if it were
coming at her through the open door, fingers out-thrust, there appeared
the hand.

She was out of bed on the instant. Somehow in her throat she repressed
the upstartled cry, "Jim," by an effort that strained all her nerves and
ma