going up to bed. She was certainly, he realized, a very pretty woman,
and very graceful and very amusing, and though she probably knew all
about it, she was the franker and honester for her knowledge.

He had arrived at this conclusion just as he turned the switch of the
electric light inside his door, and in the first flash of the carbon
film he saw her sitting beside the window in such a chair as she had
taken and in the very pose which she had kept in the parlor. Her
half-averted face was lit as from laughing, and she had her hand lifted
as if to beat the back of her chair.

"Good Heavens, Mrs. Yarrow!" he said, in a sort of whispered shout,
while he mechanically closed the door behind him as if to keep the fact
to himself. "What in the world are you doing here?"

Then she was not there. Nothing was there; not even a chair beside the
window.

Alford dropped weakly into the only chair in the room, which stood next
the door by the head of his bed, and abandoned himself a helpless prey
to the logic of the events.

It was at this point, which I have been able to give in Wanhope's exact
words, that, in the ensuing pause, Rulledge asked, as if he thought some
detail might be denied him: "And what was the logic of the events?"

Minver gave a fleering laugh. "Don't be premature, Rulledge. If you have
the logic now, you will spoil everything. You can't have the moral until
you've had the whole story. Go on, Wanhope. You're so much more
interesting than usual that I won't ask how you got hold of all these
compromising minutiae."

"Of course," Wanhope returned, "they're not for the general ear. I go
rather further, for the sake of the curious fact, than I should be
warranted in doing if I did not know my audience so well."

We joined in a murmur of gratification, and he went on to say that
Alford's first coherent thought was that he was dreaming one of those
unwarranted dreams in which we make our acquaintance privy to all sorts
of strange incidents. Then he knew that he was not dreaming, and that
his eye had merely externated a mental vision, as in the case of the
cannon-shot splash of which he had seen the phantom as soon as it was
mentioned. He remembered afterwards asking himself in a sort of terror
how far it was going to go with him; how far his thought was going to
report itself objectively hereafter, and what were the reasonable
implications of his abnormal experiences. He did not know just how long
he sat by h