undue vehemence in his voice or his manner. He spoke with a melancholy
resignation--he seemed like a prisoner submitting to a sentence that
he had deserved. Remembering the cases of men suffering from nervous
disease who had been haunted by apparitions, I asked if he saw any
imaginary figure under the form of a boy.

"I see nothing," he said; "I only hear. Look yourself. It is in the last
degree improbable--but let us make sure that nobody has followed me from
Boulogne, and is playing me a trick."

We made the circuit of the Belvidere. On its eastward side the house
wall was built against one of the towers of the old Ab bey. On the
westward side, the ground sloped steeply down to a deep pool or tarn.
Northward and southward, there was nothing to be seen but the open moor.
Look where I might, with the moonlight to make the view plain to me, the
solitude was as void of any living creature as if we had been surrounded
by the awful dead world of the moon.

"Was it the boy's voice that you heard on the voyage across the
Channel?" I asked.

"Yes, I heard it for the first time--down in the engine-room; rising and
falling, rising and falling, like the sound of the engines themselves."

"And when did you hear it again?"

"I feared to hear it in London. It left me, I should have told you, when
we stepped ashore out of the steamboat. I was afraid that the noise of
the traffic in the streets might bring it back to me. As you know, I
passed a quiet night. I had the hope that my imagination had deceived