while the vexed look went out quickly on his face. The ghost watched
him breathlessly. But the irritated expression came back to his
countenance more resolutely than before, and he began to fumble in his
pocket for a latch-key, muttering petulantly, "What the devil is the
matter with me now?" It seemed to him that a voice had cried clearly,
yet as from afar, "Charles Renton!"--his own name. He had heard it in
his startled mind; but then, he knew he was in a highly wrought state
of nervous excitement, and his medical science, with that knowledge
for a basis, could have reared a formidable fortress of explanation
against any phenomenon, were it even more wonderful than this.

He entered the house; kicked the door to; pulled off his overcoat;
wrenched off his outer 'kerchief; slammed them on a branch of the
clothes-tree; banged his hat on top of them; wheeled about; pushed in
the door of his library; strode in, and, leaving the door ajar, threw
himself into an easy-chair, and sat there in the fire-reddened dusk,
with his white brows knit, and his arms tightly locked on his breast.
The ghost had followed him, sadly, and now stood motionless in a corner
of the room, its spectral hands crossed on its bosom, and its white
locks drooping down!

It was evident Dr. Renton was in a bad humor. The very library caught
contagion from him, and became grouty and sombre. The furniture was
grim and sullen and sulky; it made ugly shadows on the carpet and on
the wall, in allopathic quantity; it took the red gleams from the fire
on its polished surfaces in homoeopathic globules, and got no good from
them. The fire itself peered out sulkily from the black bars of the
grate, and seemed resolved not to burn the fresh deposit of black coals
at the top, but to take this as a good time to remember that those coals
had been bought in the summer at five dollars a ton,--under price, mind