heard and understood but a quarter of what the stranger
said, it came back to him afterwards, staying with him till the end of
his days, and always with a curious, haunting sense of unreality, as
though he had enjoyed a wonderful dream of which he could recall only
faint and exquisite portions.

But the horror of the earlier experience was effectually dispelled; and
when they reached the railway inn, somewhere about three o'clock in the
morning, Harris shook the stranger's hand gratefully, effusively,
meeting the look of those rather wonderful eyes with a full heart, and
went up to his room, thinking in a hazy, dream-like way of the words
with which the stranger had brought their conversation to an end as they
left the confines of the forest--

"And if thought and emotion can persist in this way so long after the
brain that sent them forth has crumbled into dust, how vitally important
it must be to control their very birth in the heart, and guard them with
the keenest possible restraint."

But Harris, the silk merchant, slept better than might have been
expected, and with a soundness that carried him half-way through the
day. And when he came downstairs and learned that the stranger had
already taken his departure, he realised with keen regret that he had
never once thought of asking his name.

"Yes, he signed the visitors' book," said the girl in reply to his
question.

And he turned over the blotted pages and found there, the last entry, in
a very delicate and individual handwriting--

"_John Silence_, London."

CASE II: THE CAMP OF THE DOG

I

Islands of all shapes and sizes troop northward from Stockholm by the
hundred, and the little steamer that threads their intricate mazes in
summer leaves the traveller in a somewhat bewildered state as regards
the points of the compass when it reaches the end of its journey at
Waxholm. But it is only after Waxholm that the true islands begin, so to
speak, to run wild, and start up the coast on their tangled course of a
hundred miles of deserted loveliness, and it was in the very heart of
this delightful confusion that we pitched our tents for a summer
holiday. A veritable wilderness of islands lay about us: from the mere
round button of a rock that bore a single fir, to the mountainous
stretch of a square mile, densely wooded, and bounded by precipitous
cliffs; so close together often that a strip of water ran between no
wider than a country lane, or, again