usion. But he was incapable of fixing his attention very closely
on any single fragment of Herbert's apology, or of rousing himself into
being much more than a dispassionate and not very interested spectator
of the little melodrama that Fate, it appeared, had at the last moment
decided rather capriciously to twist into a farce. He turned with a
smile to the face so keenly fixed and enthusiastic with the question it
had so laboriously led up to: 'But surely, I don't quite see...'

Herbert lifted his glass as if to his visitor's acumen and set it down
again without tasting it. 'Why, my dear fellow,' he said triumphantly,
'even a dream must have a peg. Yours was this unforgettable old suicide.
Candidly now, how much of Sabathier was actually yours? In spite of all
that that fantastical fellow, Herbert, said last night, dead men DON'T
tell tales. The last place in the world to look for a ghost is where
his traitorous bones lie crumbling. Good heavens, think what irrefutable
masses of evidence there would be at our finger-tips if every tombstone
hid its ghost! No; the fellow just arrested you with his creepy
epitaph: an epitaph, mind you, that is in a literary sense distinctly
fertilizing. It catches one's fancy in its own crude way, as pages
and pages of infinitely more complicated stuff take possession of,
germinate, and sprout in one's imagination in another way. We are all
psychical parasites. Why, given his epitaph, given the surroundings, I
wager any sensitive consciousness could have guessed at his face; and
guessing, as it were, would have feigned it. What do you think, Grisel?'

'I think, dear, you are talking absolute nonsense; what do they call
it--"darkening counsel"? It's "the hair of the dog," Mr Lawford.'

'Well, then, you see,' said Herbert over a hasty mouthful, and turning
again to his victim--'then you see, when you were just in the pink of
condition to credit any idle tale you heard, then I came in. What, with
the least impetus, can one NOT see by moonlight? The howl of a dog turns
the midnight into a Brocken; the branch of a tree stoops out at you like
a Beelzebub crusted with gadflies. I'd, mind you, sipped of the deadly
old Huguenot too. I'd listened to your innocent prattle about the child
kicking his toes out on death's cupboard door; what more likely thing in
the world, then, than that with that moon, in that packed air, I should
have swallowed the bait whole, and seen Sabathier in every crevice of