it--ah!--yes----"

Slowly and with infinite pain he wrote, printing the letters in thick
and crooked capitals, whilst his breath whistled through the dilated
nostrils and one foot beat unceasingly against the desk.

"The answer to the problem concerning Leonie Hetth is in the third
volume upon----"

His hand stopped suddenly when the fingers involuntarily spread wide
apart, letting fall the pen which rolled across the book; and the
silvery head turned inch by inch until the grey eyes had lifted to the
one shining in the shadows.

And there commenced a desperate, a bitter struggle for a child's
reason, perhaps for a child's life, as the moon gently withdrew her
light.

Like the clammy wraiths of fog upon the moor, like the searching
tentacles of some blind monster of the sea, fear crept upon the
splendid old man in this still hour of the night.

It held his hands, it was folded about his mouth, it pounded violently
upon his gallant heart, whilst the eye looked him between the eyes, so
that his brain was seared as strive he might to turn away his head he
kept his face turned piteously upward.

"What is it," he muttered thickly, as though his tongue clove to the
roof of the mouth, "what is it that is pulling me, pressing upon me,
choking me! I have no body, no--no hands--I--have--no power to