“If you are determined to remain here, Mr. Klaw,” said Sir James, “I shall not endeavour to dissuade you, of course; but I should prefer to see you turn into more comfortable quarters.” “No, no,” was the reply; “it is here I shall lay down my old head, it is here I shall lie and wait for him, the one who laughs.” Accordingly, since the hour grew late, we left this novel ghost-hunter stretched out upon the settee in the billiard room; and as I knew his objection to any disturbance, I suggested to Sir James that we should retire out of earshot for a final smoke ere seeking our separate apartments. We sat chatting for close upon an hour, I suppose. Then Clement Leyland left us, saying that he had had a heavy day. “Clement’s been working real hard,” the baronet confided to me. “In the circumstances, as I think I told you, I have decided to abandon Grange, and we are having the old Friars House, a mile from here, but on part of the estate, restored. It hasn’t been inhabited for about three generations, and it’s very much older than Grange; part of it dates back to King John. Perhaps I can get servants to stop there, though, and it’s quite impossible to keep up Grange without a staff. Clement has been superintending the work over there all day; he’s one of the best.” A few moments later we parted for the night. I left Sir James at the door of his room, which had formerly opened off the balcony overlooking the banqueting hall. That door was now walled up, however, and the entrance was from the corridor beyond. The room allotted to me was upon the opposite side of the same corridor and farther to the north. I felt particularly unlike sleep. The extremely modern furniture of my room could not rob the walls, with their small square panelling, of the air of hoary antiquity which was theirs. The one window, deep set and overlooking an extensive orchard, was such as might have formed the focus for cavalierly glance, was such as might have framed the head of a romantic maid of Stuart days. And with it all was that gloomy air that had a more remote antiquity, that harked back to darker times than those of the Merry Monarch: the air of ghostly evil, the cloud from which proceeded the devilish laughter, the obscene whisperings. Where the shadows of the trees lay beneath me on the turf, I could fancy a gray cowled figure flitting across the lighted patches and lurking, evilly watching, amid the pools of darkness. Sleep was impossible. Moris Klaw, to whom such fears as mine were utterly unknown, might repose, nay, was actually reposing, in the very vortex of this psychical storm; but I was otherwise constituted. I had been with him in many cases of dark enough evil-doing, but this purely ghostly menace was something that sapped my courage.