that door, which I bolted myself last night. It never
opened, Baas; moreover, since this talk began I have been to look at it.
During the night a spider has made its web from door-post to door-post,
and that web is unbroken. If you do not believe me, come and see for
yourself. Yet they say the woman came through the doorway and therefore
through the spider's web. Oh! Baas, what is the use of wasting thought
upon the ways of spooks which, like the wind, come and go as they will,
especially in this haunted land from which, as we have all agreed, we
should do well to get away."

I went and examined the door for myself, for by now my sciatica, or
whatever it may have been, was so much better that I could walk a
little. What Hans said was true. There was the spider's web with the
spider sitting in the middle. Also some of the threads of the web were
fixed from post to post, so that it was impossible that the door could
have been opened or, if opened, that anyone could have passed through
the doorway without breaking them. Therefore, unless the woman came
through one of the little window-places, which was almost incredible as
they were high above the ground, or dropped from the smoke-hole in the
roof, or had been shut into the place when the door was closed on the
previous night, I could not see how she had arrived there. And if any
one of these incredible suppositions was correct, then how did she get
out again with two men watching her?

There were only two solutions to the problem--namely, that the whole
occurrence was hallucination, or that, in fact, Ragnall and Savage had
seen something unnatural and uncanny. If the latter were correct I only
wished that I had shared the experience, as I have always longed to
see a ghost. A real, indisputable ghost would be a great support to our
doubting minds, that is if we _knew_ its owner to be dead.

But--this was another thought--if by any chance Lady Ragnall were still
alive and a prisoner upon that mountain, what they had seen was no
ghost, but a shadow or _simulacrum_ of a living person projected
consciously or unconsciously by that person for some unknown purpose.
What could the purpose be? As it chanced the answer was not difficult,
and to it the words she was reported to have uttered gave a cue. Only a
few hours ago, just before we turned in indeed, as I have said, we had
been discussing matters. What I have not said is that in the end we
arrived at the conclusion that our