ference that surround Mrs. Harvey-Browne at home. And
won't you go to bed? You can't think how sleepy I am.'

'Will you come away with me to-morrow?'

'We'll talk it over in the morning. I'm not nearly awake enough now.'

Charlotte got up reluctantly and went to the door leading into her
bedroom. Then she came back and crossed over to the windows and peeped
out between the yellow curtains. 'It's bright moonlight,' she said, 'and
so quiet. The sea is like a pond. How clear the Sassnitz lights are.'

'Are they?' I murmured drowsily.

'Are you really going to leave your windows open? Any one can get in. We
are almost on a level with the beach.'

To this I made no answer; and my little travelling-clock on the table
gave point to my silence by chiming twelve.

Charlotte went away slowly, candle in hand. At her door she stopped and
looked back. 'It seems,' she said, 'that I have got that unfortunate
man's bed.'

So it was the Berlin gentleman who was making her restless.

'And you,' she went on, 'have got the one his daughter was to have had.'

'Is she alive?' I asked sleepily.

'Oh yes, she's alive.'

'Well, that was nice, anyway.'

'I believe you are frightened,' I murmured, as she still lingered.

'Frightened? What of?'

'The Berlin gentleman.'

'Absurd,' said Charlotte, and went away.

I was having a most cheerful dream in which I tried hard to remember the
exact words Herbert Spencer uses about effete beliefs that, in the
stole, still cling about the necks of priests, and, in gaiters, linger
round the legs of bishops, and was repeating the words about the bishops
in a rapture of enjoyment--and indeed it is a lovely sentence--when a
sudden pause of fear came into my dream, and I felt that some one beside
myself was in the room.

The dark to me has always been full of terrors. I can look back through
my memories and find past years studded with horrible black nights on
which I woke up and was afraid. Till I have lit a candle, how can I
remember that I do not believe in ghosts, and in nameless hideousnesses
infinitely more frightful than ghosts? But what courage is needed to sit
up in all the solid, pressing blackness, and stretch out one defenceless
hand into it to feel about for the matches, appalled by the echoing
noises the search produces, cold with fear that the hand may touch
something unknown and terrible. And so at Binz, dragged out of my
pleasant dream to night and loneliness, I could not mov