ame back to his countenance more resolutely
than before, and he began to fumble in his pocket for a latch-key,
muttering petulantly, "What the devil is the matter with me now?"
It seemed to him that a voice had cried clearly, yet as from afar,
"Charles Renton!"--his own name. He had heard it in his startled
mind; but then, he knew he was in a highly wrought state of nervous
excitement, and his medical science, with that knowledge for a basis,
could have reared a formidable fortress of explanation against any
phenomenon, were it even more wonderful than this.

He entered the house; kicked the door to; pulled off his overcoat;
wrenched off his outer 'kerchief; slammed them on a branch of the
clothes-tree; banged his hat on top of them; wheeled about; pushed
in the door of his library; strode in, and, leaving the door ajar,
threw himself into an easy-chair, and sat there in the fire-reddened
dusk, with his white brows knit, and his arms tightly locked on his
breast. The ghost had followed him, sadly, and now stood motionless
in a corner of the room, its spectral hands crossed on its bosom,
and its white locks drooping down!

It was evident Dr. Renton was in a bad humor. The very library caught
contagion from him, and became grouty and sombre. The furniture
was grim and sullen and sulky; it made ugly shadows on the carpet
and on the wall, in allopathic quantity; it took the red gleams
from the fire on its polished surfaces in homoeopathic globules,
and got no good from them. The fire itself peered out sulkily from
the black bars of the grate, and seemed resolved not to burn the
fresh deposit of black coals at the top, but to take this as a good
time to remember that those coals had been bought in the summer at
five dollars a ton,--under price, mind you,--when poor people, who
cannot buy at advantage, but must get their firing in the winter,
would then have given nine or ten dollars for them. And so (glowered
the fire), I am determined to think of that outrage, and not to
light them, but to go out myself, directly! And the fire got into
such a spasm of glowing indignation over the injury, that it lit
a whole tier of black coals with a series of little explosions,
before it could cool down, and sent a crimson gleam over the moody
figure of its owner in the easy-chair, and over the solemn furniture,
and into the shadowy corner filled by the ghost.

The spectre did not move when Dr. Renton arose and lit the chandelier.
It s