trimmed the wick. The light brightened directly, and the room
became less dismal.

Again he turned to the riddles; reading them doggedly and
resolutely, now in one corner of the card, now in another. All his
efforts, however, could not fix his attention on them. He pursued
his occupation mechanically, deriving no sort of impression from
what he was reading. It was as if a shadow from the curtained bed
had got between his mind and the gaily printed letters--a shadow
that nothing could dispel. At last, he gave up the struggle, and
threw the card from him impatiently, and took to walking softly up
and down the room again.

The dead man, the dead man, the HIDDEN dead man on the bed! There
was the one persistent idea still haunting him. Hidden? Was it
only the body being there, or was it the body being there,
concealed, that was preying on his mind? He stopped at the window,
with that doubt in him; once more listening to the pattering rain,
once more looking out into the black darkness.

Still the dead man! The darkness forced his mind back upon itself,
and set his memory at work, reviving, with a painfully-vivid
distinctness the momentary impression it had received from the
first sight of the corpse. Before long the face seemed to be
hovering out in the middle of the darkness, confronting him through
the window, with the paleness whiter, with the dreadful dull line
of light between the imperfectly-closed eyelids broader than he had
seen it--with the parted lips slowly dropping farther and farther
away from each other--with the features growing larger and moving
closer, till they seemed to fill the window and to silence the