don!"

This speech had the desired effect, and nothing more--for the time at
least--was said about retiring.

"Do you think Leon is quite--er--like--er--like us?" Kelson said, when
Hamar left them, after administering his admonition. "At times he
hardly looks human. His face is such a funny colour, such a lurid
yellow, and his eyes, so piercing! He gives me the jumps! I can't bear
to think of him at night!"

"Rubbish," Curtis growled. "You imagine it. There's nothing of the
spook about Leon! He's of this world and nothing but this world."

It was odd, however, that from that time he, too, began to have the
same feeling--the feeling that Hamar was perpetually watching
them--watching them awake and watching them asleep! Curtis awoke one
night to see, standing on his hearth, a shadowy figure with a lurid
yellow face and two gleaming dark eyes, which were fixed on him. He
called out, and it vanished!

"Of course it's the nut steak!" And thus he tried to assure himself.
But he was badly scared all the same.

Another night, he saw some one, he took to be Hamar, peeping at him
from behind the window curtains. He threw a slipper at the figure, and
the slipper went right through it. If Hamar's phantom had been the
only thing he saw, he would not have minded much; but both he and
Kelson soon began to see and hear other things. Curtis frequently saw
half-materialized forms, forms of men with cone-shaped heads and
peculiarly formed limbs, stealing up the staircase in front of him,
and, turning into his bedroom, vanish there. He heard them moving
about, long after he had got into bed. Sometimes they would glide up
to the bed and bend over him, and though he could never see their
eyes, he could feel they were fixed mockingly on him. Once he saw the
door of his wardrobe slowly open, and a white something with a
dreadful face--half human and half animal--steal slyly out and
disappear in the wall opposite. And once when he put out his hand to
feel for the matches, they were gently thrust into his palm, whilst
the walls of the room shook with laughter.

Kelson was equally tormented, though the phenomena took rather a
different form. Alone in his bedroom at night, the shape of the room
would frequently change; either the walls and ceiling would recede,
and recede, until they assumed the proportions of some vast chamber,
full of gloom and strange shadows; or they would slowly, very slowly,
close in upon him, as if it were their in