f the tunnel. There were the high wet stone walls of the
cutting. There were the stars above them.

"Do you see it?" I asked him, taking particular note of his face.
His eyes were prominent and strained; but not very much more so,
perhaps, than my own had been when I had directed them earnestly
towards the same point.

"No," he answered. "It is not there."

"Agreed," said I.

We went in again, shut the door, and resumed our seats. I was thinking
how best to improve this advantage, if it might be called one, when
he took up the conversation in such a matter-of-course way, so
assuming that there could be no serious question of fact between
us, that I felt myself placed in the weakest of positions.

"By this time you will fully understand, sir," he said, "that what
troubles me so dreadfully is the question, What does the spectre
mean?"

I was not sure, I told him, that I did fully understand.

"What is its warning against?" he said, ruminating, with his eyes
on the fire, and only by times turning them on me. "What is the
danger? Where is the danger? There is danger overhanging, somewhere
on the Line. Some dreadful calamity will happen. It is not to be
doubted this third time, after what has gone before. But surely
this is a cruel haunting of _me_. What can _I_ do?"

He pulled out his handkerchief, and wiped the drops from his heated
forehead.

"If I telegraph Danger on either side of me, or on both, I can
give no reason for it," he went on, wiping the palms of his hands.
"I should get into trouble, and do no good. They would think I
was mad. This is the way it would work:--Message: 'Danger! Take
care!' Answer: 'What Danger? Where?' Message: 'Don't know. But
for God's sake take care!' They would displace me. What else could
they do?"

His pain of mind was most pitiable to see. It was the mental torture
of a conscientious man, oppressed beyond endurance by an unintelligible
responsibility involving life.

"When it first stood under the Danger-light," he went on, putting
his dark hair back from his head, and drawing his hands outward
across and across his temples in an extremity of feverish distress,
"why not tell me where that accident was to happen,--if it must
happen? Why not tell me how it could be averted,--if it could have
been averted? When on its second coming it hid its face, why not
tell me instead: 'She is going to die. Let them keep her at home'?
If it came, on those two occasions, only to show me