most
coincidental, and happened to our engineer friend, Mr Vercoe. When we
told him about the noises we had heard, he roared with laughter.

"'Well,' he said, 'I always understood you Corsicans were superstitious,
but this beats everything. The regulation stereotype ghost in armour and
clanking chains, eh! Do you know what the sounds were, Baroness? Rats!'
and he smiled odiously.

"Then a sudden idea flashed across me. 'Look here, Mr Vercoe,' I
exclaimed, 'there is one room in our Castle I defy even you--sceptic as
you are--to sleep in. It is the Barceleri Chamber, called after my
ancestor, Barceleri Paoli. He visited China in the fifteenth century,
bringing back with him a number of Chinese curiosities, and a Buddha
which I shrewdly suspect he had stolen from a Canton temple. The room is
much the same as when my ancestor occupied it, for no one has slept in
it since. Moreover, the servants declare that the noises they so
frequently hear come from it. But, of course, you won't mind spending a
night in it?'

"Mr Vercoe laughed. 'He, he, he! Only too delighted. Give me a bottle of
your most excellent vintage, and I defy any ghost that was ever
created!'

"He was as good as his word, Mr O'Donnell, and though he had advised the
contrary, we--that is to say, my mother, my husband, our two old
servants and I--sat up in one of the rooms close at hand.

"Eleven, twelve, one, two, and three o'clock struck, and we were
beginning to wish we had taken his advice and gone to bed, when we heard
the most appalling, agonising, soul-rending screams for help. We rushed
out, and, as we did so, the door of Mr Vercoe's room flew open and
something--something white and glistening--bounded into the
candle-light.

"We were so shocked, so absolutely petrified with terror, that it was a
second or so before we realised that it was Mr Vercoe--not the Mr Vercoe
we knew, but an entirely different Mr Vercoe--a Mr Vercoe without a
stitch of clothing, and with a face metamorphosed into a lurid, solid
block of horror, overspreading which was a suspicion of
something--something too dreadful to name, but which we could have sworn
was utterly at variance with his nature. Close at his heels was the
blurred outline of something small and unquestionably horrid. I cannot
define it. I dare not attempt to diagnose the sensations it produced.
Apart from a deadly, nauseating fear, they were mercifully novel.

"Dashing past us, Mr Vercoe literally hurled h