ulty at the highest tension, a horrible thought came upon him. What
if Carhayes had really escaped--was really alive? Why should he not
avow himself openly--why come prowling around like a midnight assassin?
And then the answer suggested itself. Might it not be that his mind,
unhinged by the experiences of his captivity, was filled with the one
idea--to exact a deadly vengeance upon the wife who had so soon
forgotten him? Such things had been, and to this man, watching there in
the darkness, the idea was horrible enough.

Stay! There was one way of placing the matter beyond all doubt. He
remembered that the soil beneath Eanswyth's window was loose dust--a
trifle scratched about by the fowls, but would give forth the print of a
human foot with almost the distinctness of snow.

Quickly he moved to the spot. Striking a wax vesta, and then another,
he peered eagerly at the ground. The atmosphere was quite still, and
the matches flamed like a torch. His heart beat and his pulses
quickened as he carefully examined the ground--then a feeling of intense
relief came upon him. _There was no sign of a human footprint_.

No living thing could have stood under that window, much less climbed up
to it, without leaving its traces. There were no traces; ergo, no
living thing had been there, and he did not believe in ghosts. The
whole affair had been a hallucination on the part of Eanswyth. This was
bad, in that it seemed to point to a weak state of health or an
overloaded mind. But it was nothing like so bad as the awful misfortune
involved by the reality would have been--at any rate, to him.

He did not believe in ghosts, but the idea crossed his mind that so far
as from allaying Eanswyth's fears, the utter impossibility of any living
being having approached her window without leaving spoor in the sandy,
impressionable soil, would have rather the opposite tendency. Once the
idea got firmly rooted in her mind that the dead had appeared to her
there was no foreseeing the limits of the gravity of the results. And
she had been rather depressed of late. Very anxiously he re-entered the
house to report the utter futility of his search.

"At all events we'll soon make it impossible for you to get another
_schrek_ in the same way, Mrs Carhayes," said the overseer cheerily.
"We'll fasten the shutters up."

It was long before the distressed, scared look faded from her eyes.
"Eustace," she said--Bentley having judiciously le