"Nor I," she answered, "but I knew, somehow, that it was there. It is very strange and uncanny, and I shall insist on an explanation from Alresca." She gave a forced laugh. As I fumbled with the handle of the door she took hold of my hand. "Listen!" she said excitedly, "this will be a small room, and over the mantelpiece is a little round picture of a dog." I opened the door with something akin to a thrill. This part of the house was unfamiliar to me. The room was certainly a small one, but there was no little round picture over the mantelpiece. It was a square picture, and rather large, and a sea-piece. "You guessed wrong," I said, and I felt thankful. "No, no, I am sure." She went to the square picture, and lifted it away from the wall. "Look!" she said. Behind the picture was a round whitish mark on the wall, showing where another picture had previously hung. "Let us go, let us go! I don't like the flicker of these candles," she murmured, and she seized my arm. We returned to the corridor. Her grip of me tightened. "Was not that Alresca?" she cried. "Where?" "At the end of the corridor--there!" "I saw no one, and it couldn't have been he, for the simple reason that he can't walk yet, not to mention climbing three flights of stairs. You have made yourself nervous." We descended to the ground-floor. In the main hall Alresca's housekeeper, evidently an old acquaintance, greeted Rosa with a curtsy, and she stopped to speak to the woman. I went on to the salon. The aspect of the room is vividly before me now as I write. Most of the great chamber was in a candle-lit gloom, but the reading-lamp burnt clearly at the head of the couch, throwing into prominence the fine profile of Alresca's face. He had fallen asleep, or at any rate his eyes were closed. The copy of "Madame Bovary" lay on the floor, and near it a gold pencil-case. Quietly I picked the book up, and saw on the yellow cover of it some words written in pencil. These were the words: "Carl, I love her. He has come again. This time it is ----" I looked long at his calm and noble face, and bent and listened. At that moment Rosa entered. Concealing the book, I held out my right hand with a gesture. "Softly!" I enjoined her, and my voice broke. "Why? What?" "He is dead," I said. It did not occur to me that I ought to have prepared her. CHAPTER VII THE VIGIL BY THE BIER We looked at each other, Rosa and I, across the couch of Alresca. All the vague and terrible apprehensions, disquietudes, misgivings, which the gradual improvement in Alresca's condition had lulled to sleep, aroused themselves again in my mind, coming, as it were, boldly out into the open from the dark, unexplored grottos wherein they had crouched and hidden. And I went back in memory to those sinister days in London before I had brought Alresca to Bruges, days over which a mysterious horror had seemed to brood.