illustrations, but she was really waiting in suspense for his arrival
and thinking of nothing else.

She looked up at him with a strange smile. "Back!" she said. "And you
find me malingering!"

He came up to the bed. "You've been ill," he said, and he did not return
her smile. "I'm very sorry, Lena."

"No, only tired," she said. "And I am already better, Jim," she went on,
and now she showed great nervousness and her voice was jerky. "I have a
letter for you. I want you to read it at once, dear, but not here; read
it in the library. Don't stay now; go away, dear, and come and see me
afterwards."

She gave him the letter with the handwriting downwards. She had thought
this out beforehand. She feared the sight of his emotion. She could not
bear it--just now. She was still feeling very shaky and very weak.

He took the letter and turned it over to see the handwriting. She
thought he made a movement of surprise. His face she did not look at,
she looked at the paper that was lying before her. She longed for him to
go away, now that the letter was safely in his hands. He guessed, no
doubt, what the letter was about! He must guess!

She little knew. He no more guessed its contents than he would have
guessed that in order to secure his salvation some one would be allowed
to rise from the dead! The letter he regarded as ominous--of some
trouble, some dispute, something inevitable and miserable.

"I hope you have everything you want, Lena," he said as he walked to the
door. "I hope Louise doesn't fuss you." Then he asked: "Have you ever
fainted before?"

Lady Dashwood said she hadn't, but added that people over fifty
generally fainted, and that she would not have gone to bed had not dear
May insisted on it as well as Louise.

He went out. He found the corridor silent. He walked along with that
letter in his pocket, feeling a great solitude within him. When he
passed Gwendolen's door, something gripped him painfully. And then there
was _her_ door, too!

He returned to the library and sat down by the tea-table and the fire.

From his chair his eyes rested upon the great window at the end of the
library. It was screened by curtains now. It was there, at that exact
spot by the right-hand curtain, that Gwendolen had fancied she saw the
ghost. A ghost, a thin filmy shape was probably her only conception of
something Spiritual. That the story of the Barber's ghost, the story
that he came as a prophet of ill tidings to the