thick features, and angry, savage eyes. It belonged to a common man, and
it was evil in its ordinary normal expression, no doubt, but as he saw
it, alive with intense, aggressive emotion, it was a malignant and
terrible human countenance.

There was no movement of the air; nothing but the sound of rushing
feet--stockinged or muffled feet; the apparition of the face; and the
almost simultaneous extinguishing of the candle.

In spite of himself, Shorthouse uttered a little cry, nearly losing his
balance as his aunt clung to him with her whole weight in one moment of
real, uncontrollable terror. She made no sound, but simply seized him
bodily. Fortunately, however, she had seen nothing, but had only heard
the rushing feet, for her control returned almost at once, and he was
able to disentangle himself and strike a match.

The shadows ran away on all sides before the glare, and his aunt stooped
down and groped for the cigar case with the precious candle. Then they
discovered that the candle had not been _blown_ out at all; it had been
_crushed_ out. The wick was pressed down into the wax, which was
flattened as if by some smooth, heavy instrument.

How his companion so quickly overcame her terror, Shorthouse never
properly understood; but his admiration for her self-control increased
tenfold, and at the same time served to feed his own dying flame--for
which he was undeniably grateful. Equally inexplicable to him was the
evidence of physical force they had just witnessed. He at once
suppressed the memory of stories he had heard of "physical mediums" and
their dangerous phenomena; for if these were true, and either his aunt
or himself was unwittingly a physical medium, it meant that they were