ssed between Paul Oleron and Elsie Bengough,
yet this nosing rascal must be prying and talking!...

Oleron crumpled the paper up, held it in the candle flame, and then
ground the ashes under his heel.

One useful purpose, however, the letter had served: it had created in
Oleron a wrathful blaze that effectually banished pale shadows.
Nevertheless, one other puzzling circumstance was to close the day. As he
undressed, he chanced to glance at his bed. The coverlets bore an impress
as if somebody had lain on them. Oleron could not remember that he
himself had lain down during the day--off-hand, he would have said that
certainly he had not; but after all he could not be positive. His
indignation for Elsie, acting possibly with the residue of the brandy in
him, excluded all other considerations; and he put out his candle, lay
down, and passed immediately into a deep and dreamless sleep, which, in
the absence of Mrs. Barrett's morning call, lasted almost once round the
clock.

VIII

To the man who pays heed to that voice within him which warns him that
twilight and danger are settling over his soul, terror is apt to appear
an absolute thing, against which his heart must be safeguarded in a twink
unless there is to take place an alteration in the whole range and scale
of his nature. Mercifully, he has never far to look for safeguards. Of
the immediate and small and common and momentary things of life, of
usages and observances and modes and conventions, he builds up
fortifications against the powers of darkness. He is even content that,
not terror only, but joy also, should for working purposes be placed in
the category of the absolute things; and the last treason he will commit
will be that breaking down of terms and limits that strikes, not at one
man, but at the welfare of the souls of all.

In his own person, Oleron began to commit this treason. He began to
commit it by admitting the inexplicable and horrible to an increasing
familiarity. He did it insensibly, unconsciously, by a neglect of the
things that he now regarded it as an impertinence in Elsie Bengough to
have prescribed. Two months before, the words "a haunted house," applied
to his lovely bemusing dwelling, would have chilled his marrow; now,
his scale of sensation becoming depressed, he could ask "Haunted by
what?" and remain unconscious that horror, when it can be proved to be
relative, by so much loses its proper quality. He was setting aside the
land