couldn't sleep! Or just prowlin' round a bit--is that it?"

The empty room, the absence of all traces of the recent tragedy, the
silence, the hour, his striped pyjamas and bare feet--everything
together combined to deprive him momentarily of speech. He stared at her
blankly without a word.

"Waal?" clanked the awful voice.

"My dear woman," he burst out finally, "there's been something awful--"
So far his desperation took him, but no farther. He positively stuck at
the substantive.

"Oh! there hasn't been nothin'," she said slowly still peering at him.
"I reckon you've only seen and heard what the others did. I never can
keep folks on this floor long. Most of 'em catch on sooner or
later--that is, the ones that's kind of quick and sensitive. Only you
being an Englishman I thought you wouldn't mind. Nothin' really happens;
it's only thinkin' like."

Shorthouse was beside himself. He felt ready to pick her up and drop her
over the banisters, candle and all.

"Look there," he said, pointing at her within an inch of her blinking
eyes with the fingers that had touched the oozing blood; "look there, my
good woman. Is that only thinking?"

She stared a minute, as if not knowing what he meant.

"I guess so," she said at length.