“Were I in a library, ‘Eugene Aram’ would probably be the last book I would choose to read; Lytton’s tales are horrible; I abominate horrors. I thought of the staircase, I glanced at it; it was really very dark. I shuddered! “I did not understand why I shuddered, unless it was on account of a draught! Of course, a draught. The house was full of draughts. The hour was late, the afternoon was cold, it was March, and undoubtedly a door was open somewhere; the book was not worth the trouble, I was over-tired, I would return to my mother. This I was actually preparing to do when the sudden appearance of a light made me pause--it came from the disused wing overhead. “I can assure you I wanted very much to go to my mother; I would have given all I possessed to have gone to my mother; I could not: I could not stir; that light enthralled me. “I had never seen such a light--such a queer, unaccountable light--a light that to anyone less sceptical might have seemed an ‘UNNATURAL’ Light! Perhaps it was an unnatural light--and I laughed. But what--what in the name of Heaven could it be? “Drawing rapidly nearer and quickly assuming the appearance and proportions of a FIRE, it filled me with the most unusual, the most preposterously unusual, doubts and fears. “And now for the first time I detected it was accompanied by incongruous though perfectly intelligible sound--the sound of someone tapping with all their might, tapping with a pair of high-heeled shoes. “Aghast at this discovery, my perplexities increased, and I was vainly endeavouring to extricate myself from a chaotic quagmire of unpleasant thoughts, when a scream, the very intensity of which made me tremble, echoed and re-echoed throughout the house. “‘Fire! Fire! Bring me Fire!’ These words, apparently so strangely paradoxical, were repeated with renewed vigour and anguish, the voice after each effort dying away into the most appalling and piteous wail. “The screams were coming nearer, but before I had time to realise the tumult was so close at hand, or to fortify myself against the tableau I now had every reason to anticipate, a girl, her hair and dress a mass of lurid flames, came rushing frantically into the gallery. “The spectacle she presented was so satanically awful that I immediately crossed myself. An indescribable thrill of terror ran through me. I felt--I KNEW--I was actually in the presence of an apparition; nothing ‘earthly’ could possibly have produced a similar or in any way equivalent effect. “Staring at me through the yellow inferno of flames was a woman’s face that, despite its horribly contorted features, was amazingly and uniquely beautiful, the perfect regularity of the Jewish lineaments being strikingly enhanced by the whiteness of the teeth, the blueness of the eyes.