"The beautiful Rose!----" said Vincent. Edward raised hurriedly the only shield he could find. It happened to be the truth as he saw it. "Oh," he said, "of course, we're all in love with her--and all hopelessly." Vincent perceived that this was truth, as Edward saw it. "What are you going to do till your train goes?" he asked. "I don't know. Cafe, I suppose, and a vilely early dinner." "Let's look in at the Musee Grevin," said Vincent. The two were friends. They had been school-fellows, and this is a link that survives many a strain too strong to be resisted by more intimate and vital bonds. And they were fellow-students, though that counts for little or much--as you take it. Besides, Vincent knew something about Edward that no one else of their age and standing even guessed. He knew that Edward was afraid of the dark, and why. He had found it out that Christmas that the two had spent at an English country house. The house was full: there was a dance. There were to be theatricals. Early in the new year the hostess meant to "move house" to an old convent, built in Tudor times, a beautiful place with terraces and clipped yew trees, castellated battlements, a moat, swans, and a ghost story. "You boys," she said, "must put up with a shake-down in the new house. I hope the ghost won't worry you. She's a nun with a bunch of keys and no eyes. Comes and breathes softly on the back of your neck when you're shaving. Then you see her in the glass, and, as often as not, you cut your throat." She laughed. So did Edward and Vincent, and the other young men; there were seven or eight of them. But that night, when sparse candles had lighted "the boys" to their rooms, when the last pipe had been smoked, the last good-night said, there came a fumbling with the handle of Vincent's door. Edward entered an unwieldy figure clasping pillows, trailing blankets. "What the deuce?" queried Vincent in natural amazement. "I'll turn in here on the floor, if you don't mind," said Edward. "I know it's beastly rot, but I can't stand it. The room they've put me into, it's an attic as big as a barn--and there's a great door at the end, eight feet high--raw oak it is--and it leads into a sort of horror-hole--bare beams and rafters, and black as Hell. I know I'm an abject duffer, but there it is--I can't face it." Vincent was sympathetic, though he had never known a night-terror that could not be exorcised by pipe, book, and candle. "I know, old chap. There's no reasoning about these things," said he, and so on. "You can't despise me more than I despise myself," Edward said. "I feel a crawling hound. But it is so. I had a scare when I was a kid, and it seems to have left a sort of brand on me. I'm branded 'coward,' old man, and the feel of it's not nice."