"But really, Frances," I said firmly, after a moment's pause, "it's too far-fetched, this explanation. A curse, you know, belongs to the ghost stories of early Victorian days." And only my positive conviction that there was something after all worth discovering, and that it most certainly was not this, prevented my suggesting that we terminate our visit forthwith, or as soon as we decently could. "This is not a haunted house, whatever it is," I concluded somewhat vehemently, bringing my hand down upon her odious portfolio. My sister's reply revived my curiosity sharply. "I was waiting for you to say that. Mabel says exactly the same. He is in it--but it's something more than that alone, something far bigger and more complicated." Her sentence seemed to indicate the sketches, and though I caught the inference I did not take it up, having no desire to discuss them with her just them indeed, if ever. I merely stared at her and listened. Questions, I felt sure, would be of little use. It was better she should say her thought in her own way. "He is one influence, the most recent," she went on slowly, and always very calmly, "but there are others--deeper layers, as it were-- underneath. If his were the only one, something would happen. But nothing ever does happen. The others hinder and prevent--as though each were struggling to predominate." I had felt it already myself. The idea was rather horrible. I shivered. "That's what is so ugly about it--that nothing ever happens," she said. "There is this endless anticipation--always on the dry edge of a result that never materializes. It is torture. Mabel is at her wits' end, you see. And when she begged me--what I felt about my sketches--I mean--" She stammered badly as before. I stopped her. I had judged too hastily. That queer symbolism in her paintings, pagan and yet not innocent, was, I understood, the result of mixture. I did not pretend to understand, but at least I could be patient. I consequently held my peace. We did talk on a little longer, but it was more general talk that avoided successfully our hostess, the paintings, wild theories, and him--until at length the emotion Frances had hitherto so successfully kept under burst vehemently forth again. It had hidden between her calm sentences, as it had hidden between the lines of her letter. It swept her now from head to foot, packed tight in the thing she then said. "Then, Bill, if it is not an ordinary haunted house," she asked, "what is it?" The words were commonplace enough. The emotion was in the tone of her voice that trembled; in the gesture she made, leaning forward and clasping both hands upon her knees, and in the slight blanching of her cheeks as her brave eyes asked the question and searched my own with anxiety that bordered upon panic. In that moment she put herself under my protection. I winced.