elpless and unconscious
spy that Mrs. Drainger, in her grave, had set upon her daughter. I was
anxious to get it over with.

"You will see," she said again and brought me into the house.

Her terror was beginning to affect me. She was quite unable to tell me
what she had seen, but her whole manner expressed a dazed horror, not so
much of some concrete fear as of the ghastly position in which she found
herself.

She led me to the door of the room in which I had last seen Mrs.
Drainger alive, but no inducement could make her come in, nor could I
get from her anything more explicit. Poor soul! I do not wonder at her
terror.

The room was as before. The shuttered windows admitted only faint bars
and pencils of light. The dim chairs and shadowy tables were
discernible, but, as if they yielded precedence to death, the most solid
object in the obscurity was the coffin in which Mrs. Drainger's body
lay. I advanced to it. The mistress of this ill-fated mansion seemed to
have grown larger in death; her body was no longer shrunken and her
folded hands still retained faintly their peculiar luminous quality. I
could see in the shadow that around her face there was no longer the
black mantle, but the face puzzled me--I could not make it out, and,
opening the shutter, I let in the light.

I stepped again to the side of the coffin. Could this be the queenly
beauty of whom Fawcett had spoken? For, where the features should have
been there was, naked to the light, only a shapeless, contorted mass of
flesh in which, the twisted eyelids being closed, there seemed to my
horrified gaze no decent trace of human resemblance!

I turned half-sick from the sight. Emily Drainger, tall, pallid yellow,
her great eyes burning with an evil glow, her lemon dress an unhealthy
splotch in the doorway, stood regarding me.

"The will--the will!" she cried. "She thought she could stop me, but she
could not!"

"Who--what has done this?" I pointed involuntarily to her mother's face.

She seemed to expand before my eyes with evil triumph.

"I--_I_," she cried at length, her black eyes holding me as I stood,
weak and faint, clinging unconsciously to the coffin for support.
"_Twenty years ago!_ But"--she laughed hysterically and came to look at
the shapeless, brutalized face--"I never knew, until she died, that it
was done so well!!"

UNDER A WINE-GLASS[18]

[Note 18: Copyright, 1918, by The Century Company. Copyright, 1920,
by Ellen N. La M