cale had been denied to her.

Then she advanced a step, her eyes straying from the shrouded bed to
the wardrobe and back again. Then she set the candlestick upon the
table and turned round.

It must now be premised that Mrs. Nugent was utterly without a trace
of what is known as superstition; for the whole evidential value of
what follows, such as it is, depends upon that fact. She would not, by
preference, sleep in a room immediately after a death had taken place
in it, but solely for the reason of certain ill-defined physical
theories which she would have summed up under the expression that "it
was but right that the air should be changed." Her views on human
nature and its component parts were undoubtedly practical and
common-sense. To put it brutally, Amy's body was in the churchyard and
Amy's soul, crowned and robed, in heaven; so there was no more to
account for. She knew nothing of modern theories, nothing of the
revival of ancient beliefs; she would have regarded with kindly
compassion, and met with practical comments, that unwilling shrinking
from scenes of death occasionally manifested by certain kind of
temperaments.

She turned, then, and looked at the wardrobe, still full of Amy's
belongings, with her back to the bed in which Amy had died, without
even the faintest premonitory symptom of the unreasoning terror that
presently seized upon her.

It came about in this way.

She kneeled down, after a careful scrutiny of the polished surface of
the mahogany, pulled out a drawer filled to brimming over with linen
of various kinds and uses, and began to dive among these with careful
housewifely hands to discover their tale. Simultaneously, as she
remembered afterwards, there came from the hill leading down from the
direction of the station, the sound of a trotting horse.

She paused to listen, her mind full of that faint gossipy surmise that
surges so quickly up in the thoughts of village dwellers, her hands
for an instant motionless among the linen. It might be the doctor, or
Mr. Paton, or Mr. Grove. Those names flashed upon her; but an instant
later were drowned again in a kind of fear of which she could give
afterwards no account.

It seemed to her, she said, that there was something coming towards
her that set her a-tremble; and when, a moment later, the trotting
hoofs rang out sharp and near, she positively relapsed into a kind of
sitting position on the floor, helpless and paralyzed by a furious
up-