“Well, now, Saul, won’t you go on with what you was telling us?” the Deacon at length suggested. “That’s all. There’s nothing else.” The Deacon lowered his voice. “She just draws you?” “Yes.” “Often?” “That’s as it happens....” “But if it’s always there she draws you, man, haven’t you the strength to keep away from the place?” For the first time, Rutledge wearily turned his head toward his questioner. A spectral smile narrowed his colourless lips. “Ain’t any use. She follers after me....” There was another silence. What more could they ask, then and there? Mrs. Rutledge’s presence checked the next question. The Deacon seemed hopelessly to revolve the matter. At length he spoke in a more authoritative tone. “These are forbidden things. You know that, Saul. Have you tried prayer?” Rutledge shook his head. “Will you pray with us now?” Rutledge cast a glance of freezing indifference on his spiritual adviser. “If you folks want to pray, I’m agreeable,” he said. But Mrs. Rutledge intervened. “Prayer ain’t any good. In this kind of thing it ain’t no manner of use; you know it ain’t. I called you here, Deacon, because you remember the last case in this parish. Thirty years ago it was, I guess; but you remember. Lefferts Nash—did praying help _him_? I was a little girl then, but I used to hear my folks talk of it winter nights. Lefferts Nash and Hannah Cory. They drove a stake through her breast. That’s what cured him.” “Oh—” Orrin Bosworth exclaimed. Sylvester Brand raised his head. “You’re speaking of that old story as if this was the same sort of thing?” “Ain’t it? Ain’t my husband pining away the same as Lefferts Nash did? The Deacon here knows—” The Deacon stirred anxiously in his chair. “These are forbidden things,” he repeated. “Supposing your husband is quite sincere in thinking himself haunted, as you might say. Well, even then, what proof have we that the ... the dead woman ... is the spectre of that poor girl?” “Proof? Don’t he say so? Didn’t she tell him? Ain’t I seen ’em?” Mrs. Rutledge almost screamed. The three men sat silent, and suddenly the wife burst out: “A stake through the breast! That’s the old way; and it’s the only way. The Deacon knows it!” “It’s against our religion to disturb the dead.” “Ain’t it against your religion to let the living perish as my husband is perishing?” She sprang up with one of her abrupt movements and took the family Bible from the what-not in a corner of the parlour. Putting the book on the table, and moistening a livid finger-tip, she turned the pages rapidly, till she came to one on which she laid her hand like a stony paper-weight. “See here,” she said, and read out in her level chanting voice: “‘_Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live._’ “That’s in Exodus, that’s where it is,” she added, leaving the book open as if to confirm the statement.