The rain had stopped now and the lawn under his feet was soggy and water-beaten like a carpet that has been left out in a storm. He thanked fortune that it was not slippery but gave beneath his staggering tread with a resilience that aided progress. It was impossible for him to proceed at anything faster than what seemed a snail's pace. The machine must have passed the gate by this time, but there would be others. If he ever reached that distant goal he would stand there and wait.

Across the circle of lawn, around the arc of drive, he made his laborious way with clenched teeth. And so at last he came to where the tall gate loomed black and forbidding through the darkness. The heavy chain still swung its sinister scallop before it, seeming more like a prison precaution now than a warning against invasion. As he looked at the stone fence, stretching away from it on both sides, and recalled the agony with which he had scaled it, courage fled. He'd rather die, he decided, than attempt to struggle over that parapet again. So he stood, supporting himself by one of the iron rods of the gate, listening for the sound of an engine. It came at last, growing louder as the car turned the corner a quarter of a mile away. It was evidently traveling slowly in low gear. The reason was soon apparent. Its engine was missing fire.

On through the darkness it came, its lights blazing a path for its faltering progress. There was a noise of violently shifted gears and then the heavy, greasy odor of a flooded carburetor. Behind the lights there slid into view almost opposite the tall gate a high-powered roadster. A man wearing huge glasses that gleamed through the dark like the eyes of some superhuman being sprang out and wrenched open the engine hood.

For a moment Kenwick watched him, dreading to speak lest the stranger vanish and leave him solitary as the gardener had done. And then abruptly he sent his voice hurtling through the night. At sound of it he recoiled. Only those who have suffered in solitude the agony of a nameless terror know the ghastly havoc that it can work upon the human voice. Kenwick's held now a harsh, ugly tone that had in it something like a threat. The man at the engine wheeled about and leveled his huge eyes at the spot from whence the summons came. "What the devil——?" he began.

And then explanations tumbled through the barred gate in an incoherent torrent. They left the motorist with a confused impression of an automobile tragedy, a bed-ridden woman, a feeble-minded gardener, and a haunted house.

In sheer perplexity he began drawing off 

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