. Since the house is clearly dangerous, Nora, I want you to
go home."

Her laugh was uncomfortable, but Garth recognized its determined
quality.

"I'll see it through, thanks," she said. "I want this sense of suffering
destroyed. I want--you don't know how anxious I am--to see the case put
on a physical basis. So I'll watch with you."

Since he failed to alter her determination, he sent her upstairs to make
sure no one was spying, for he wanted their entrance of the room of
death to remain a secret. She beckoned him from the head of the stairs,
and he went up, and they entered the black room.

Garth closed the door and snapped his light on. Immediately strange
reflections played again over the face of the dead man. Its sneering
expression seemed to follow Garth as he moved about, searching in the
closets and the bath room, looking behind each piece of furniture.
Meantime Nora waited, for the moment stripped of her familiar
confidence. She watched the dead man rather than Garth. The knife and
the revolver, close to the cold and motionless hand, appeared to
fascinate her.

"No one," Garth whispered. "No evidence, beyond the knife, that any one
has been here unlawfully."

He removed the cushions from a lounge and arranged them in a window
recess. He seated himself with Nora there. He drew the curtains so that
they would be thoroughly concealed from any one entering the room. Then
he snapped off the light.

The vigil, Garth realized nearly at once, would not be comfortable.
Nora's obvious tenseness encouraged him to morbid fancies, to formidable
premonitions. The heavy black silence of the decaying house became more
oppressive. The near presence of the soulless thing on the bed, which
had yielded to him the puzzling note, seemed through the night capable
of a malicious and unique activity. Garth, in spite of himself, became
expectant of some abnormal and impossible movement in the room. Nora, he
knew, listened with him. Once she whispered:

"Haven't you a feeling there is some one here who laughs at us?"

The old woman's atrocious mirth came back to him.

"Hush. It is better even not to whisper."

The minutes loitered. The silence grew thicker, the presence of Taylor's
body more oppressive. Then suddenly through the night Garth became
finally aware of a movement in the room, and at first it seemed to be in
keeping with the supernatural fears Nora had imposed on him.

He aroused himself. He commenced to reason