tion would take place, and with each separate movement of
the phantasm her suspense became more and more intolerable. At last it
stood on the floor of the cellar, a broad, ungainly, horribly ungainly
figure, that glided up to and past her into the far cellar. There it
halted, as nearly as she could judge on the new tiles, and remained
standing. As she gazed at it, too fascinated to remove her eyes, there
was a loud, reverberating crash, a hideous sound of wrenching and
tearing, and the whole of the ceiling of the inner chamber came down
with an appalling roar. Lady Adela thinks that she must then have
fainted, for she distinctly remembers falling--falling into what
seemed to her a black, interminable abyss. When she recovered
consciousness, she was lying on the tiles, and all around was still
and normal. She got up, found and lighted her candle, and spent the
rest of the evening, without further adventure, in the drawing-room.

All the week Lady Adela struggled hard to master a disinclination to
spend another evening alone in the house, and when Friday came she
succumbed to her fears. The servants were poor, foolish things, but it
was nice to feel that there was something in the house besides ghosts.
She sat reading in the drawing-room till late that night, and when she
lolled out of the window to take a farewell look at the sky and stars
before retiring to rest, the sounds of traffic had completely ceased
and the whole city lay bathed in a refreshing silence. It was very
heavenly to stand there and feel the cool, soft air--unaccompanied,
for the first time during the day, by the rattling rumbling sounds of
locomotion and the jarring discordant murmurs of unmusical
voices--fanning her neck and face.

Lady Adela, used as she was to the privacy of her yacht, and the
freedom of her big country mansion, where all sounds were regulated at
her will, chafed at the near proximity of her present habitation to
the noisy thoroughfare, and vaguely looked forward to the hours when
shops and theatres were closed, and all screeching, harsh-voiced
products of the gutter were in bed. To her the nights in Waterloo
Place were all too short; the days too long, too long for anything.
The heavy, lumbering steps of a policeman at last broke her reverie.
She had no desire to arouse his curiosity; besides, her costume had
become somewhat disordered, and she had the strictest sense of
propriety, at least in the presence of the lower orders. Ret