Page 57 (1/1)

I

Laurie was sitting in his roohtfully, and conte his journey to Stantons

It was more than six weeks now since his experience in Queen's Gate, and he had gone through a variety of emotions Bewildered terror was the first, a nervous interest the next, a truculent skepticism the third; and lately, to his astonishun to revive

At first he had been filled with unreasoning fear He had walked back as far as the gate of the park, hardly knohere he went, conscious only that hehimself on the south side of Hyde Park Corner, where travelers were few, he had crossed over in nervous haste to where he s Then he had dined in a restaurant, knowing that a band would be playing there, and had drunk a bottle of chaone to his rooms, cheered and excited, and had leapt instantly into bed for fear that his courage should evaporate For he was perfectly aware that fear, and a sickening kind of repulsion, fore element in his emotions

For nearly two hours, unless three persons had lied consu, that sleepless self that underlies all--had been in strange company, had become identified in some horrible manner with the soul of a dead person It was as if he had been inforht with a corpse under his bed He woke half a dozen tiht in the pleasant curtained bedroom, and each time with the terror upon hi still haunted the air? It was ren which he had demanded had not had the effect for which he had hoped He was not at all reassured by it

Then as the days went by, and he was left in peace, his horror began to pass He turned the thing over in his an to reflect that, after all, he had nothing more than he had had before in the way of evidence An hypnotic sleepThat little revelation he hadbeneath the yews, ht easily be accounted for by the fact that he himself knew it, that it had been a deeper element in his experience than he had known, and that he had told it aloud It was no proof of anything more