nese
bronze.

Suddenly, however, the unfortunate husband grasped the arm of my coat.

"My promise!" he exclaimed.

"You mean to keep it at any cost?"

"Yes," said he. "I trusted her judgment and her loyalty, and gave her my
word."

"Pah!" I exploded angrily. His literal sense of honor, his narrow
conscience which led him into inexpediency, seemed to me a part of a
feminine rather than of a masculine nature, and more ridiculous than
high-minded.

"Well, wait here, then," I snapped back at him as Margaret Murchie
opened the door. "If necessary I will call you."

The old servant said nothing until we were in the hall, but her face was
white with fear. I read on it the word she had transmitted to us by
telephone. And whether or not it was my imagination, I felt the presence
of a crisis and a forewarning that the inexplicable events which I had
observed were now to come to some explosive end.

Margaret's first words, said to me with her two large hands raised as
if to ward off a menace, were not reassuring.

"The scratching noise!" she cried. "The soft scratching noise!"

I turned her toward me by grasping her shoulder.

"No hysteria," I said firmly. "Every second may count. Tell me quickly
what has happened."

"Yes, sir," she said, bracing herself. "I've done as you told me--very
faithful. I went this morning to get my orders from her. I don't say the
voice that answered me weren't hers."

"Well, would you say it was?" I asked savagely.

"I think I would, sir," she replied. "It was strange and changed and
soft. I could hardly hear it. She said she didn't require anything. So I
came away."

"And then--?"

"And then I did as you told me. I went to her door often enough and
listened. You told me not to call to her unless there wasn't any sound.
But there was a sound--a dreadful sound after a body had listened to it
a bit."

"A sound?"

"Yes, a scratching sound. Sometimes it would stop and then it would go
on again. And all the time it seemed to me more than ever that she
wasn't alone in that room."

"Wasn't alone! What made you think so?" I exclaimed.

"I couldn't just say," answered Margaret. "I've never been able to say.
It's just a feeling--a strange and terrible feeling, sir, that somebody
else is there. But the scratching sound I heard with my two ears. And
you never heard so worrying a sound before!"

"It has stopped?" I said.

"Yes, it has stopped. It stopped just before I telephoned. I th