a long
neglect that to the mind, if not to the eye, has softening effect. Alec
listened a moment, as it were, to the silence and loneliness of the
house, and went into the first dark room.

It was a large room, probably a parlour of some pretension, but the only
light came through the door and lit it very faintly. All the windows of
the house were shut with wooden shutters, and Alec, not being aware
that, except in the rooms Harkness had occupied, the shutters were
nailed, went to a window to open it. He fumbled with the hasp, and,
concluding that he did not understand its working, went on into the next
room to see if the window there was to be more easily managed. In this
next room he was in almost total darkness. He had not reached the window
before he heard some one moving in an adjoining room. Turning, he saw a
door outlined by cracks of lamplight, and as it was apparent that some
one else was in the house, he made at once for this door. Before he had
reached it the cracks of light which guided him were gone; and when he
had opened it, the room on whose threshold he stood was dark and silent;
yet, whether by some slight sounds, or by some subtler sense for which
we have no name, he was convinced that there was some one in it.
Indignant at the extinction of the light and at the silence, he turned
energetically again in the direction of the window in order to wrench
it open, when, hearing a slight scratching sound, he looked back into
the inner room. There was light there again, but only a small vaporous
curl of light. Connecting this with the sound, he supposed that a poor
sulphur match had been struck; but this supposition perhaps came to him
later, for at the moment he was dazed by seeing in this small light the
same face he had seen over old Cameron's coffin. The sight he had had of
it then had almost faded from his memory; he had put it from him as a
thing improbable, and therefore imaginary; now it came before his eyes
distinctly. A man's face it certainly was not, and, in the fleet moment
in which he saw it now, he felt certain that it was a woman's. The
match, if it was a match, went out before its wood was well kindled, and
all he could see vanished from sight with its light. His only thought
was that whoever had escaped him before should not escape him again, and
he broke open the window shutters by main strength.

The light poured in upon a set of empty rooms, faded and dusty. A glance
showed him an open d