eaming down the outside, and the blurred lights of the city beyond.
But the room was empty, appallingly empty; and so still. He stood there,
cold as ice, staring, shivering listening. Suddenly there was a step
behind him and a light flashed into the room, and when he turned quickly
with his arm up as if to ward off a terrific blow he found himself face
to face with the landlady. Instantly the reaction began to set in.

It was nearly three o'clock in the morning, and he was standing there
with bare feet and striped pyjamas in a small room, which in the
merciful light he perceived to be absolutely empty, carpetless, and
without a stick of furniture, or even a window-blind. There he stood
staring at the disagreeable landlady. And there she stood too, staring
and silent, in a black wrapper, her head almost bald, her face white as
chalk, shading a sputtering candle with one bony hand and peering over
it at him with her blinking green eyes. She looked positively hideous.

"Waal?" she drawled at length, "I heard yer right enough. Guess you
couldn't sleep! Or just prowlin' round a bit--is that it?"

The empty room, the absence of all traces of the recent tragedy, the
silence, the hour, his striped pyjamas and bare feet--everything
together combined to deprive him momentarily of speech. He stared at her
blankly without a word.

"Waal?" clanked the awful voice.

"My dear woman," he burst out finally, "there's been something awful--"
So far his desperation took him, but no farther. He positively stuck at
the substantive.

"Oh! there hasn't been nothin'," she said slowly still peering at him.
"I reckon you've only seen and heard what the others did. I never can
keep folks on this floor long. Most of 'em catch on sooner or
later--that is, the ones that's kind of quick and sensitive. Only you
being an Englishman I thought you wouldn't mind. Nothin' really happens;
it's only thinkin' like."

Shorthouse was beside himself. He felt ready to pick her up and drop her
over the banisters, candle and all.

"Look there," he said, pointing at her within an inch of her blinking
eyes with the fingers that had touched the oozing blood; "look there, my
good woman. Is that only thinking?"

She stared a minute, as if not knowing what he meant.

"I guess so," she said at length.

He followed her eyes, and to his amazement saw that his fingers were as
white as usual, and quite free from the awful stain that had been there
ten minutes befo