ing there in that lonely house, sweating with horror,
listening ... listening. He asked me once, did I believe in ghosts? I told
him no, but I said I'd known a case of man returning to life long after he
was supposed to be dead. I related the story--one which had come under my
observation as a medical man. He listened with gnawing lip and pale face,
and from my window afterwards I saw him striding home across the moors,
glancing backwards in the dusk.

"It was his own fault that he ever heard those footsteps in the way he
feared. He did not play the game, according to our poor conception of what
the game is. If he had done so he would have been quite safe from me. But
there are some things too shocking to be contemplated, even in the worst
of our kind. A man does not give away a woman--that is one of the rules.
Robert Turold put a woman to shame in her coffin.

"I had kept out of her way, never going to Flint House because I feared
her feminine eyes might be too sharp for me. But she fell ill, and Robert
Turold asked me to attend her. Refusal was impossible, as there was no
other doctor nearer than Penzance.

"She did not recognize me--at first, but the shock I received when I saw
her left me almost stunned. I had carried her memory through the
years--the image of a pretty slim girl, with brown hair and eyes, and kind
of soft vivacity which was her greatest charm. In her place I found, lying
there, a withered grey woman with dim eyes and broken spirit. God knows
what she had gone through at his hands, but it had destroyed her.

"It was her death-bed. She was worn out in body and spirit, and had no
strength to rally. She was weeks dying, but her life was steadily ebbing
all that time. It was a kind of slow fever. She was delirious when I first
saw her, and delirious or unconscious, with few lucid intervals, until she
died. And the jargon of her wandering mind was in reality the outpouring
of a tortured soul. It was the title and the family name--always that, and
nothing else. She wasn't well-born enough or sufficiently educated to bear
the title as his wife--it seemed that that fact had been impressed on her
again and again in the long lean years of the search for the family tree.
Let her go away ... go away somewhere quietly with Sisily, and she would
never bother him any more. That was the unceasing burden of her cry, a cry
to which I was compelled to listen with a torn heart.

"The reserve, the frame of mind, which