not easy to make out the letters
printed on it in consequence of the dimness of the light which the
landlord had left him--a common tallow candle, furnished with a pair of
heavy old-fashioned steel snuffers. Up to this time his mind had been
too much occupied to think of the light. He had left the wick of the
candle unsnuffed till it had risen higher than the flame, and had burned
into an odd pent-house shape at the top, from which morsels of the
charred cotton fell off from time to time in little flakes. He took up
the snuffers now and trimmed the wick. The light brightened directly,
and the room became less dismal.

Again he turned to the riddles, reading them doggedly and resolutely,
now in one corner of the card, now in another. All his efforts,
however, could not fix his attention on them. He pursued his occupation
mechanically, deriving no sort of impression from what he was reading.
It was as if a shadow from the curtained bed had got between his mind
and the gayly printed letters--a shadow that nothing could dispel. At
last he gave up the struggle, threw the card from him impatiently, and
took to walking softly up and down the room again.

The dead man, the dead man, the _hidden_ dead man on the bed!

There was the one persistent idea still haunting him. Hidden! Was it
only the body being there, or was it the body being there _concealed,_
that was preying on his mind? He stopped at the window with that doubt
in him, once more listening to the pattering rain, once more looking out
into the black darkness.

Still the dead man!

The darkness forced his mind back upon itself, and set his memory
at work, reviving with a painfully vivid distinctness the momentary
impression it had received from his first sight of the corpse. Before
long the face seemed to be hovering out in the middle of the darkness,
confronting him through the window, with the paleness whiter--with
the dreadful dull line of light between the imperfectly-closed eyelids
broader than he had seen it--with the parted lips slowly dropping
further and further away from each other--with the features growing
larger and moving closer, till they seemed to fill the window, and to
silence the rain, and to shut out the night.

The sound of a voice shouting below stairs woke him suddenly from the
dream of his own distempered fancy. He recognized it as the voice of the
landlord.

"Shut up at twelve, Ben," he heard it say. "I'm off to bed."

He wiped away