the
narrow passage the candle seemed half smothered by its blackness. For the
first time in his memory Bobby faced the entrance of the sinister room
alone. He pushed open the broken door. He paused on the threshold. It
impressed him as not unnatural that he should experience such misgivings.
They sprang not alone from the fact that within twenty-four hours two men
had died unaccountably within these faded walls. Nor did the evidence
pointing to his own unconscious guilt wholly account for them. At the
bottom of everything was the fact that from his earliest childhood he had
looked upon the room as consecrated to death; had consequently feared it;
had, he recalled, always hurried past the disused corridor leading in its
direction.

Through its wide spaces the light of the candle scarcely penetrated. No
more than an indefinite radiance thrust back the obscurity and outlined
the bed. He could barely see the stark, black form outstretched there.

The dim, vast room, as he advanced, imposed upon him a sense of
isolation. Katherine in the upper hall, the others downstairs, whose
voices no longer reached him, seemed all at once far away. He stood in a
place lonelier and more remote than the piece of woods where he had
momentarily opened his eyes last night; and, instead of the straining
trees and the figure in the black mask which he had called his
conscience, he had for motion and companionship only the swaying of the
curtains in the breeze from the open window and the dark, prostrate thing
whose face as he went closer was like a white mask--a mask with a fixed
and malevolent sneer.

The wind caught the flame of the candle, making it flicker. Tenuous
shadows commenced to dance across the walls. He paused with a tightening
throat, for the form on the bed seemed moving, too, with sly and scarcely
perceptible gestures. Then he understood. It was the effect of the
shaking candle, and he forced himself to go on, but a sense of a multiple
companionship accompanied him--a sense of a shapeless, soundless
companionship that projected an idea of a steady regard. There swept
through his mind a procession of figures in quaint dress and with faces
not unlike his own, remembered from portraits and family legends, men and
women to whom this room had been familiar, within whose limits they had
suffered, cried out a too-powerful agony, and died. It seemed to him that
he waited for voices to guide him, to urge him on as Katherine had urged