the tall straightness of her figure. Her black hair hung in two thick ropes over her shoulders; her feet were bare; and her face was that of one who sees unspeakable things. The eyes were wide open, and in their glassy stare was a strange hunger and a great question.

She came on like an uncaptured spirit, feeling delicately along the paneled wall, a creature of body and flesh, but directed by some mysterious influence beyond human ken. She did not look toward the window but paused for a moment to survey the portrait with an unearthly and profound recognition. From this she turned to the desk, leaning over it, her dangling ropes of hair rendered semi-luminous against the lamp, peering, peering, till at length the long, questing fingers found what they sought, and poised, quivering above the stain.

Now she swayed, leaning ever a little more forward, till at last her head drooped, her arms stretched out, and her lips touched that darkened patch where they rested in a mute and desperate caress.

“Master,” she pleaded, “master, where are you now? Why did you go; why are you not here where you used to be? The evil waits still, and all is empty and cold and dead without you, all dead, all dead!”

The voice ceased like a wail in the night, drowned in silence. Her lips pressed close to the stain till they seemed to infuse into it the message of her own blood, while the blind fingers groped and groped for that they could not find. Then with a sigh that hung tremulous in the throbbing air she moved to the portrait, made a slow, despairing gesture of farewell, and glided back to the door and out of sight.

Derrick, rooted where he stood, thrilled to a new light that began to flicker in his brain. The fabric of his imagination was becoming more substantial. He had seen the soul of a woman stripped of all disguise, and heard a voice that was robbed of all powers of concealment. The essential meaning of this danced before his mind’s eye.

CHAPTER V THE PAPER-KNIFE

THE PAPER-KNIFE

THE VILLAGE of Bamberley lay about two miles from Beech Lodge, a homelike nest of buildings gathered in a wrinkle of the Sussex hills. It was well removed from any main road, and its thatched roofs and crooked cobbled streets had fortunately escaped the demoralizing finger of progress. It was, in fact, just as it had always been in the memory of its oldest inhabitant. A village green, with the pens of the cattle market 

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