aim, in astonishment.

"Pardon me, I can scarcely claim a personal acquaintance. But yours is
the only English name entered to-day in the Livre des Etrangers."

"You are staying at the Hotel de la Concorde, then?"

An inclination of the head is all the answer vouchsafed.

"May I ask," I continue, "whether you heard just now a very strange cry
repeated three times?"

A pause. The lustrous eyes seem to search me through and through--I can
hardly bear their gaze. Then he replies.

"I fancy I heard the echoes of some such sounds as you describe."

The _echoes_! Is this, then, the man who gave utterance to those cries
of woe! is it possible? The face seems so passionless; but the pallor of
those features bears witness to some terrible agony within.

"I thought some one must be in distress," I rejoin, hastily; "and I
hurried back to see if I could be of any service."

"Very good of you," he answers, coldly; "but surely such a place as this
is not unaccustomed to the voice of sorrow."

"No doubt. My impulse was a mistaken one."

"But kindly meant. You will not sleep less soundly for acting on that
impulse, Reginald Westcar."

He rises as he speaks. He throws his cloak round him, and stands
motionless. I take the hint. My mysterious countryman wishes to be
alone. Some one that he has loved and lost lies buried here.

"Good-night, sir," I say, as I move in the direction of the little
chapel at the gate. "Neither of us will sleep the less soundly for
thinking of the perfect repose that reigns around this place."

"What do you mean?" he asks.

"The dead," I reply, as I stretch my hand toward the graves. "Do you not
remember the lines in 'King Lear'?

"'After life's fitful fever he sleeps well.'"

"But _you_ have never died, Reginald Westcar. You know nothing of the
sleep of death."

For the third time he speaks my name almost familiarly, and--I know not
why--a shudder passes through me. I have no time, in my turn, to ask him
what he means; for he strides silently away into the shadow of the
church, and I, with a strange sense of oppression upon me, returned to
my hotel.

* * * * *

The events which I have just related passed in vivid recollection
through my mind as I travelled northward one cold November day in the
year 185--. About six months previously I had taken my degree at Oxford,
and had since been enjoying a trip upon the continent; and on my return
to London I fo