breath, and stair by stair he descended, driving steadily before
him the crouching, gloating menacing shape, darkly lifted up
before him against the darkness, contending the way with him.

'Are you ill? Are you hurt? Has anything happened, Lawford?' came
the anxious old voice again, striving in vain to be restrained.

'No, no,' muttered Lawford. 'I am coming; coming slowly.' He
paused to breathe, his hands trembling, his hair lank with sweat,
and still with eyes wide open he descended against the phantom
lurking in the darkness--an adversary that, if he should but for
one moment close his lids, he felt would master sanity and
imagination with its evil. 'So long as you don't get in,' he
heard himself muttering, 'so long as you don't get in, my
friend!'

'What's that you're saying?' came up the muffled, querulous
voice; 'I can't for the life of me hear, my boy.'

'Nothing, nothing,' came softly the answer from the foot of the
stairs. 'I was only speaking to myself.'

Deliberately, with candle held rigidly on a level with his eyes,
Lawford pushed forward a pace or two into the airless, empty
drawing-room, and grasped the handle of the door. He gazed in
awhile, a black oblique shadow flung across his face, his eyes
fixed like an animal's, then drew the door steadily towards him.
And suddenly some power that had held him tense seemed to fail.
He thrust out his head, and, his face quivering with fear and
loathing, spat defiance as if in a passion of triumph into the