it. Would mother term all this her airs and graces, of which she confessed ignorance, and would she persist in her opinion as to Amy being a dear little wife for any man? Why not? A thousand times, why not?

Thus I tiptoed, preening myself on the highest step, in boundless security. I read the letter through again from beginning to end, chuckling, and went to bed, and almost immediately to sleep.

I woke from sleep with a start, as though an icecold hand had stroked

my

neck.

There, to my horror, standing not erect, but bowed before me, with eyes full of sorrow, was, in his own white light and clearer than I had ever seen him, my visitant.

I could not speak. I could not move. Literally I felt that my body had become a great stone. Something held me in its power as I stared into his unflinching eyes.

I had the sensation of falling, falling, falling. I made a desperate effort to take advantage of his deep dejection. I was strengthless. He looked feeble and sad, but I could not resist. It seemed a long hour that I lay there motionless under his sad eyes. At last he spoke.

"I am so sorry," he said, "but it has to be. The other way was no use. Such a pity! Such a great pity!"

I made a convulsive struggle to ask what he meant; my lips would not move. He faded and was

gone.

IX

THEY used to feed the snakes in the Zoological Gardens on little live animals. In the glass case the little animal scuffled away from the man's hand in its new freedom and hopped about for a few minutes, until it came under the snake's stare and its movement ceased. On waking in the morning I felt very much as one of those little animals must feel when first its eye catches the snake's eye and he knows that he has escaped from the man's hand only to meet a worse enemy. I was in the glass case with the snake. A mysterious horror had me in its hold.

When I got up and tried to dress myself, I was obliged to sit as much as I could owing to actual physical weakness. It seemed, too, that my heart was beating faster than it should.

To put a brave face on the matter, I said to myself: "This is really getting past a joke."

I told mother, who immediately noticed that I was not so well, that I had slept abominably. Amy's letter had entirely passed from my mind, but it flashed back when I saw her, and I was able to take her on one side and tell her how much I had appreciated its intention.

"And you don't think too badly of me?" she asked with very dear timidity.

"Not a bit. Not a bit," I replied.

You're hu

man, human." She looked at me askance on account of the intensity of meaning which I put into the word. I answered her look of fear with a hearty "To be human— that's what I like my friends to be."

She must have known what I meant, but she was obliged to assert herself and say, as she drew herself timidly and prettily up (she always looked fresh and lovely in the morning):

"What else can human beings be?"

"Oh, millions of things!" I laughed back.

All through breakfast I was continually on the verge of the horror that brooded deep within me. In lulls of the talk it was clear to me that measures must be taken, drastically and speedily, to tackle it. I put off thinking what those measures should be, and I spun out all the little details of breakfast to their finest.

After breakfast, chiefly to gain time, I suppose, I wandered into mother's sitting-room and announced, à propos of nothing at all:

"I say, mater, I proposed to Amy, you know, and she said she must have three months to think over her answer."

My mother was making lists on half sheets of paper, as she always did after breakfast; she has always been a great believer in lists. She looked up at me, pushing on her spectacles with gentle firmness, and said:

"Well, dear?"

"Oh, I thought I'd tell you. That's all."

She smiled her dearest smile to say slowly: "I don't think that you have any cause for worry in that."

I never could understand why I always felt such a very male man when mother spoke to me about Amy. "I don't worry, of course," I said.

Suddenly, on the spur of the moment an idea came to me as I was turning away:

"Oh, there's another thing. Aren't there some papers or something that belonged to Grandfather Albert?" That was how we used generally to refer to my father's father.

"Yes: there are some notes and writings: a pile of old exercise books and letters."

"Do you know where they are?"

'Yes, dear. I keep them locked up in the cabinet."

"Could you let me have a look at them some time?"

She took a key from a drawer at her desk and went to the cabinet, which from my earliest childhood had been a thing of awe to me, and mystery. It opened like a bookcase, but inside there were no shelves, only drawers, many and deep. One of these she pulled out, and extracted a bundle of paperbacked exercise-books, tied up with faded pink tape, and a bundle of letters in one fat envelope, also tied up with faded pink tape.

"These are some of his notes and jottings; these

are his letters to your father. He was a very fine old man before he. . . . Always strange in his ways."

"Dr. Redman spoke to me about him."

"Dr. Redman almost worshipped him." "Somehow one doesn't expect devotion in a man like Redman.”

"No?" said my mother.

lunch."

"But he's coming to

I laughed with pleasure; the inconsequence was so exactly like her; and something in me was pleased that I could still laugh with pleasure, in spite of the mysterious horror which was somehow set stirring by the sight and touch of those old papers. As I held these bundles in my hand I dared not think of the connection between my grandfather and my familiar, betwen the old man's tragic end in an asylum and my own secret terror of insanity. I dared not think of it, I say; yet I was deeply aware that in some way, by the mere recognition of their existence, I was taking a definite and important step, though in what direction I did not know. For a moment I hesitated. It was on the tip of my tongue to give the bundles back; but I waited and watched my mother push in the drawer, close the doors of the cabinet, turn the key and replace it in the drawer of her desk.

I waited, while my mother resumed her lists. She said:

"Father intended to write a life of Grandfather Albert."