ease and very repentant of ever having
said anything. But after my compliment to the house we got on better.

"It's on my mind," he said; "I shan't be easy till someone else knows."

We were in the front room where a good fire was burning--in my honour, I
guessed, for the apartment had not the air of being much used. On the
table were some photographs. Barnes showed them me. They were
enlargements from those he had taken of poor Radcliffe's last ascent.

"They've been shown all over the world," he said. "Millions of people
have seen them."

"Well?" I said.

"But there's one no one has seen--no one except me."

He produced another print and gave it to me. I glanced at it. It seemed
much like the others, having been apparently one of the last of the
series, taken when the aeroplane was at a great height. The only thing
in which it differed from the others was that it seemed a trifle
blurred.

"A poor one," I said; "it's misty."

"Look at the mist," he said.

I did so. Slowly, very slowly, I began to see that that misty appearance
had a shape, a form. Even as I looked I saw the features of a human
countenance--and yet not human either, so spectral was it, so unreal and
strange. I felt the blood run cold in my veins and the hair bristle on
the scalp of my head, for I recognised beyond all doubt that this face
on the photograph was the same as that Radcliffe had sketched. The
resemblance was absolute, no one who had seen the one could mistake the
other.

"You see it?" Barnes muttered, and his face was almost as pale as mine.

"There's a woman," I stammered, "a woman floating in the air by his
side. Her arms are held out to him."

"Yes," Barnes said. "Who was she?"

The print slipped from my hands and fluttered to the ground. Barnes
picked it up and put it in the fire. Was it fancy or, as it flared up,
and burnt and was consumed, did I really hear a faint laugh floating
downwards from the upper air?

"I destroyed the negative," Barnes said, "and I told my boss something
had gone wrong with it. No one has seen that photograph but you and me,
and now no one ever will."

VIII

THE TERROR BY NIGHT

Maynard disincumbered himself from his fishing-creel, stabbed the butt
of his rod into the turf, and settled down in the heather to fill a
pipe. All round him stretched the undulating moor, purple in the late
summer sunlight. To the southward, low down, a faint haze told where the
sea lay. The stream at