rning, coming down to breakfast braced to grapple with fresh
adversity, we were surprised to find our garrulous friend of the
previous day--he was late in making his appearance--strangely silent and
(apparently) pre-occupied. Having polished off our porridge, we ran out
to feed the rabbits, explaining to them that a beast of a tutor would
prevent their enjoying so much of our society as formerly.

On returning to the house at the fated hour appointed for study, we were
thunderstruck to see the station-cart disappearing down the drive,
freighted with our new acquaintance. Aunt Eliza was brutally
uncommunicative; but she was overheard to remark casually that she
thought the man must be a lunatic. In this theory we were only too ready
to concur, dismissing thereafter the whole matter from our minds.

Some weeks later it happened that Uncle Thomas, while paying us a flying
visit, produced from his pocket a copy of the latest weekly, _Psyche: a
Journal of the Unseen_; and proceeded laboriously to rid himself of much
incomprehensible humour, apparently at our expense. We bore it
patiently, with the forced grin demanded by convention, anxious to get
at the source of inspiration, which it presently appeared lay in a
paragraph circumstantially describing our modest and humdrum habitation.
'Case III.,' it began. 'The following particulars were communicated by a
young member of the Society, of undoubted probity and earnestness, and
are a chronicle of actual and recent experience.' A fairly accurate
description of the house followed, with details that were unmistakable;
but to this there succeeded a flood of meaningless drivel about
apparitions, nightly visitants, and the like, writ in a manner
betokening a disordered mind, coupled with a feeble imagination. The
fellow was not even original. All the old material was there--the storm
at night, the haunted chamber, the white lady, the murder re-enacted,
and so on--already worn threadbare in many a Christmas Number. No one
was able to make head or tail of the stuff, or of its connexion with our
quiet mansion; and yet Edward, who had always suspected the fellow,
persisted in maintaining that our tutor of a brief span was, somehow or
other, at the bottom of it.

[Illustration]

A FALLING OUT

HAROLD told me the main facts of this episode some time later,--in bits
and with reluctance. It was not a recollection he cared to talk about.
The crude blank misery of a moment is apt