d!"

"It can't be helped," the Canon said. "Excuse me, Dale, I have to go
out. But--stay--I shall be back in half an hour."

And he went out into the hall, took his coat and hat and left the house.
Miss Bigelow was his cross. She was a rich invalid, portentously
delicate, full of benefactions to the parish and fears for the welfare
of her soul. She kept the Canon's charities going royally, but, in
return, she claimed the Canon's ghostly ministrations at odd times to an
extent that sometimes caused the good man's saintly equanimity to
totter. Hating doctors and loving clergymen, Miss Bigelow was forever
summoning her distracted father confessor to speed that parting
guest--her soul, which however, never departed. She remarked in
confidence to those about her, that she had endured "a dozen deathbeds."
The Canon had sat beside them all. He must now take his way to the
thirteenth.

As soon as the hall door banged Maurice looked up at Lily.

"Poor, dear father," she murmured.

"I am glad," Maurice said abruptly.

The remark might have been called rude, but it was so simply made that
it had the dignity belonging to any statement of plain truth. Neither
rude nor polite, it was merely a cry of fact from an overburdened human
soul. Lily felt that the words were forced from the young doctor by some
strange agitation that fought to find expression.

"You wish--you wish--" she began.

Then she stopped. The flood of expression that welled up in her
companion's face frightened her. She trembled at the thought of the
hidden thing, the force, that could loose such a sea.

"What is it?" she said like a schoolgirl--or so, a moment afterwards,
she feared.

"I ought not to tell you," Maurice said, "I ought not, but I must--I
must."

He had got up and was standing before her. His back was to the fire, and
a shadow was over his face.

"I want to tell you. You have made me want to. Why is that?"

He spoke as if he were questioning his own intellect for the reason, not
asking it of her. And she did not try to answer his question.

"I suppose," he continued, "it is because you are the only human being
who has partially understood that there is something with me that sets
me apart from all my kind, from all the others."

"With you?" Lily said.

She felt horribly frightened and yet strong and earnest.

"Yes, with me," he answered. "I told you that I was a haunted man. Miss
Alston, can you, will you bear to hear what it is th