"I don't know," the cook replied. "I can't be expected to know everything. The cooking's enough for me--at least for the wages I get. Rosalie's been gone somewhere for the last two hours. I haven't seen or heard anything of her since tea." "And the children?" Fitzsimmons inquired. "Oh, the children's all right," the cook answered--"at least I suppose so; and, you bet, they'd have let me know fast enough if they hadn't been. I don't know which of the two hollers loudest." "Well, get my supper, for mercy's sake, for I'm famishing," Fitzsimmons said; and he stalked back again into the darkness. After groping about the hall for some time and knocking over a good few things, he at length put his hands on a match-box, and lighting a candle made straight for the nursery. The children had got into bed partially undressed, and were sound asleep, with their heads well buried under the bedclothes. Fitzsimmons contrived to uncover their faces without waking them, and kissing them both lightly on the forehead, he left them and went downstairs to his study. Here he drew up a chair close to the fire and, throwing himself into it, prepared to wait till the gong sounded for supper. A slight noise in the room made him look round. Across the window recess, from which the sound apparently came, a pair of heavy red curtains were tightly drawn. Fitzsimmons rather wondered at this, because Rosalie did not usually draw the curtains before she lighted up; so he was still looking at them and wondering, when they were suddenly shaken so violently that the metal rings made a loud rattling and jarring on the brass pole to which they were attached. Fitzsimmons watched in breathless anticipation. Every second he expected to see the curtains part and some ghoulish face peering out at him. Drawn curtains so often suggest lurking horrors of that description. Instead, however, the curtains only grew more and more agitated, shaking violently as if they had the ague. Then, all of a sudden, they were still. Fitzsimmons rose and was about to look behind them, when they started trembling again, and the one nearest the fireplace began to bulge out in the middle. Fitzsimmons stared at it with a sickening sense of foreboding. At first it had no definite form, but, very gradually, it assumed a shape, the shape he felt it would, and moved nearer him. For some seconds he was too overcome with horror to do anything, but his recollections of what it had looked like in the coombe that night, and his utter detestation of it, increased his fear, and in a frenzy of rage he snatched up a revolver from the mantelpiece and fired at it. Fitzsimmons thinks it was the bullet that made it suddenly collapse; but I am inclined to think it was the sound of the report--as sound undoubtedly does, at times, bring about dematerialisation. There are, I think, certain sounds that generate vibrations in the air favourable to the manifestation of spirits, and other sounds that create vibratory motion