ow--the oil from that
old reading-lamp and this cotton-wool. Now the match, quick! Pull the
sheet away, you fool! We don't want it now."

There was a great roar from the grate as the flames shot up. Saunders
had been a fraction of a second too late with the sheet. The oil had
fallen on to it. It, too, was burning.

"The whole place will be on fire!" cried Eustace, as he tried to beat
out the flames with a blanket. "It's no good! I can't manage it. You
must open the door, Saunders, and get help."

Saunders ran to the door and fumbled with the bolts. The key was stiff
in the lock.

"Hurry!" shouted Eustace; "the whole place is ablaze!"

The key turned in the lock at last. For half a second Saunders stopped
to look back. Afterwards he could never be quite sure as to what he had
seen, but at the time he thought that something black and charred was
creeping slowly, very slowly, from the mass of flames towards Eustace
Borlsover. For a moment he thought of returning to his friend, but the
noise and the smell of the burning sent him running down the passage
crying, "Fire! Fire!" He rushed to the telephone to summon help, and
then back to the bathroom--he should have thought of that before--for
water. As he burst open the bedroom door there came a scream of terror
which ended suddenly, and then the sound of a heavy fall.

The Mass of Shadows

BY ANATOLE FRANCE

From _Mother of Pearl_, by Anatole France. Copyright by John Lane
Company. By permission of the publishers.

This tale the sacristan of the church of St. Eulalie at Neuville
d'Aumont told me, as we sat under the arbor of the White Horse, one fine
summer evening, drinking a bottle of old wine to the health of the dead
man, now very much at his ease, whom that very morning he had borne to
the grave with full honors, beneath a pall powdered with smart silver
tears.

"My poor father who is dead" (it is the sacristan who is speaking,) "was
in his lifetime a grave-digger. He was of an agreeable disposition, the
result, no doubt, of the calling he followed, for it has often been
pointed out that people who work in cemeteries are of a jovial turn.
Death has no terrors for them; they never give it a thought. I, for
instance, monsieur, enter a cemetery at night as little perturbed as
though it were the arbor of the White Horse. And if by chance I meet
with a ghost, I don't disturb myself in the least about it, for I
reflect that he may just as likely ha