been disentangled from the
wreckage of garage and willow tree and towed away to receive expert
attention. We were awaiting the arrival of the new car I had ordered for
the honeymoon tour Desire and I were soon to take. Phillida had declared
two weeks shopping a necessary preliminary to the wedding of a bride who
was to live in New York "and meet everybody." Nor would I have shortened
the pretty orgy into which the two girls entered, transforming my
sorceress into a lady of the hour; happiness seeming to me rather to be
savored than gulped.

Needless to say, there was no more talk of the convent whose iron gates
were to have closed between the last Desire Michell and the world. She
had been directed there by the priest whose island mission was near her
father's. In her solitude and ignorance of life, the sisterhood seemed
to offer a refuge in which to keep her promise to her father. But she
had to learn the principles of the Church she was about to adopt, and
during that period of delay I had come to the old house.

On the second day of his visit, we told all the story to the Professor.
We could not have told Aunt Caroline, but we told him.

"It is perfectly simple," he pronounced at the end. "Interesting, even
unique in points, but simple of explanation."

"And what may be the explanation?" I inquired with scepticism.

"Marsh gas," he replied triumphantly. "Have none of you young people
ever considered the singular emanations from swamps and marshes where
rotting vegetation underlies shallow water? Phillida, I am astonished
that you did not enlighten your companions on this point. You, at least,
have been carefully educated, not in the light froth of modern music and
art, but in the rudiments of science. I do not intend to wound your
feelings, Roger!"

"I am not wounded, sir," I retorted. "Just incredulous!"

"Ah?" said the Professor, with the bland superiority of his tribe.
"Well, well! Yet even you know something of the evils attending people
who live in low, swampy areas; malaria, ague, fevers. In the tropics,
these take the form of virulent maladies that sweep a man from earth in
a few hours. Your lake _was_ haunted, so was the house that once stood
in its basin, as some vague instinct strove to warn the generations of
Michells as well as you. Haunted by emanations of some powerful form of
marsh gas given forth more plentifully at night, which lowered the heart
action and impeded the breathing of one drawing