rds which brought to her lips a smile of perfect
felicity.

Now had I been a superstitious man I should have promptly declared the
whole thing to have been an apparition. But as I do not believe in
borderland theories, any more than I believe that a man whose heart is
nearly cut in twain can again breathe and live, I could only stand
aghast, bewildered and utterly dumfounded.

Hidden from them by a low thorn-bush, I stood in silent stupefaction
as they passed by. That it was no chimera of the imagination was
proved by the fact that their footsteps sounded upon the path, and
just as they had passed I heard Courtenay address his wife by name.
The transformation of her countenance from the ineffable picture of
grief and sorrow to the calm, sweet expression of content had been
marvellous, to say the least--an event stranger, indeed, than any I
had ever before witnessed. In the wild writings of the old romancers
the dead have sometimes been resuscitated, but never in this workaday
world of ours. There is a finality in death that is decisive.

Yet, as I here write these lines, I stake my professional reputation
that the man I saw was the same whom I had seen dead in that upper
room in Kew. I knew his gait, his cough, and his countenance too well
to mistake his identity.

That night's adventure was certainly the most startling, and at the
same time the most curious, that ever befel a man. Thus I became
seized with curiosity, and at risk of detection crept forth from my
hiding-place and looked out after them. To betray my presence would be
to bar from myself any chance of learning the secret of it all;
therefore I was compelled to exercise the greatest caution. Mary
mourned the loss of her husband towards the world, and yet met him in
secret at night--wandering with him by that solitary bye-path along
which no villager ever passed after dark, and lovers avoided because
of the popular tradition that a certain unfortunate Lady of the Manor
of a century ago "walked" there. In the fact of the mourning so well
feigned I detected the concealment of some remarkable secret.

The situation was, without doubt, an extraordinary one. The man upon
whose body I had made a post-mortem examination was alive and well,
walking with his wife, although for months before his assassination he
had been a bed-ridden invalid. Such a thing was startling, incredible!
Little wonder was it that at first I could scarce believe my own eyes.
Only when I