st story.

"You boys," she said, "must put up with a shake-down in the new house. I
hope the ghost won't worry you. She's a nun with a bunch of keys and no
eyes. Comes and breathes softly on the back of your neck when you're
shaving. Then you see her in the glass, and, as often as not, you cut
your throat." She laughed. So did Edward and Vincent, and the other
young men; there were seven or eight of them.

But that night, when sparse candles had lighted "the boys" to their
rooms, when the last pipe had been smoked, the last good-night said,
there came a fumbling with the handle of Vincent's door. Edward entered
an unwieldy figure clasping pillows, trailing blankets.

"What the deuce?" queried Vincent in natural amazement.

"I'll turn in here on the floor, if you don't mind," said Edward. "I
know it's beastly rot, but I can't stand it. The room they've put me
into, it's an attic as big as a barn--and there's a great door at the
end, eight feet high--raw oak it is--and it leads into a sort of
horror-hole--bare beams and rafters, and black as Hell. I know I'm an
abject duffer, but there it is--I can't face it."

Vincent was sympathetic, though he had never known a night-terror that
could not be exorcised by pipe, book, and candle.

"I know, old chap. There's no reasoning about these things," said he,
and so on.

"You can't despise me more than I despise myself," Edward said. "I feel
a crawling hound. But it is so. I had a scare when I was a kid, and it
seems to have left a sort of brand on me. I'm branded 'coward,' old man,
and the feel of it's not nice."

Again Vincent was sympathetic, and the poor little tale came out. How
Edward, eight years old, and greedy as became his little years, had
sneaked down, night-clad, to pick among the outcomings of a
dinner-party, and how, in the hall, dark with the light of an "artistic"
coloured glass lantern, a white figure had suddenly faced him--leaned
towards him it seemed, pointed lead-white hands at his heart. That next
day, finding him weak from his fainting fit, had shown the horror to be
but a statue, a new purchase of his father's, had mattered not one
whit.

Edward had shared Vincent's room, and Vincent, alone of all men, shared
Edward's secret.

And now, in Paris, Rose speeding away towards Cannes, Vincent said:
"Let's look in at the Musee Grevin."

The Musee Grevin is a wax-work show. Your mind, at the word, flies
instantly to the excellent exhibition founded b