ce,
still retained mysteriously in his abode, of the soul that was gone to
its account. Through him it seized upon Kate, and thus the mystic number
was made up, three souls were bound and linked together. (I hear as I
write the voice of the grey traveller by the burn in the twilight.) And
in the first soul I had planted the seed of death, and so in the second
and in the third. Now, thrusting as it were backward through Kate and
Hugh Fraser, I fought with a dead man, long ago, perhaps, wrapped in
pain unknown. But, as the influence of Doctor Wedderburn had
formerly--before the fever--dominated my influence, so now it dominated
my influence from the tomb. Indeed, this man whom I had destroyed had a
drear revenge upon me. There had been an interregnum when the doctor
wavered from Christianity to atheism. But that had ceased to be. He died
undoubting, a blatant unbeliever. Hence, surely, his deadly power now.
He returned, as it were, to slay me. The spectre at the Manse defied me.

Slowly I grew to feel, to know, all this. It did not come upon me in a
moment; for sometimes my worldly affairs still occupied me. My glory of
health and of strength still delighted me. I was as Faust--I was as
Faust in his monstrous and damnable youth. But there came a time when
the spectre at the Manse touched me with the hand of Hugh Fraser. And
then I rose up to battle with it, trembling at the thought of the grey
boy's words at the thought of the Caesar of hell whose tribute was three
human souls.

Kate and I were taking tea one evening with Fraser. We sat around the
hearth, by which was placed the table with the tea-service and the hot
cakes. Fraser began, as was his habit now, to discuss religious subjects
and to rail against the professors of faith. Kate listened to him
eagerly--a filthy fire, so I thought, gleaming in her great eyes. I was
silent, watching. And presently it seemed to me that Fraser's gestures
in talking grew like the dead gestures of the doctor. He threw his
hands abroad with the fingers divided in a manner of Wedderburn's. He
struck his knees sharply, and simultaneously, with both his palms to
emphasise his remarks, a frequent habit of the dead man's. So vehement
was the similarity that I began presently to feel that the doctor
himself declaimed in the firelight, and I was seized with a desire to
combat effectively his wicked, but forcible arguments. I broke in, then,
upon Fraser's tirade and cried the cause of religio