of the horror that was said to
reign within. It was neither lonely nor unkempt. It stood, crowded into
a corner of the square, and looked exactly like the houses on either
side of it. It had the same number of windows as its neighbours; the
same balcony overlooking the gardens; the same white steps leading up to
the heavy black front door; and, in the rear, there was the same narrow
strip of green, with neat box borders, running up to the wall that
divided it from the backs of the adjoining houses. Apparently, too, the
number of chimney pots on the roof was the same; the breadth and angle
of the eaves; and even the height of the dirty area railings.

And yet this house in the square, that seemed precisely similar to its
fifty ugly neighbours, was as a matter of fact entirely
different--horribly different.

Wherein lay this marked, invisible difference is impossible to say. It
cannot be ascribed wholly to the imagination, because persons who had
spent some time in the house, knowing nothing of the facts, had declared
positively that certain rooms were so disagreeable they would rather die
than enter them again, and that the atmosphere of the whole house
produced in them symptoms of a genuine terror; while the series of
innocent tenants who had tried to live in it and been forced to decamp
at the shortest possible notice, was indeed little less than a scandal
in the town.

When Shorthouse arrived to pay a "week-end" visit to his Aunt Julia in
her little house on the sea-front at the other end of the town, he found
her charged to the brim with mystery and excitement. He had only
received her telegram that morning, and he had come anticipating
boredom; but the moment he touched her hand and kissed her apple-skin
wrinkled cheek, he caught the first wave of her electrical condition.
The impression deepened when he learned that there were to be no other
visitors, and that he had been telegraphed for with a very special
object.

Something was in the wind, and the "something" would doubtless bear
fruit; for this elderly spinster aunt, with a mania for psychical
research, had brains as well as will power, and by hook or by crook she
usually managed to accomplish her ends. The revelation was made soon
after tea, when she sidled close up to him as they paced slowly along
the sea-front in the dusk.

"I've got the keys," she announced in a delighted, yet half awesome
voice. "Got them till Monday!"

"The keys of the bathing-ma