“Am I losing touch of humanity in face of a little botheration?” he thought. Then he added aloud, with a spirit of scorn: “Words, words! But you would force me again into being the agent of your self-martyrdom. It won’t do, my friend. The lodge may serve as museum until it is pulled down. I see at least that the most disgusting item of the collection has vanished.” “The skull, sir? Yes, it is gone.” They laboured at their task once more; and once more Mr. Tuke fell into profound musing over the perplexities of his later lot. In this connection were two matters for worrying consideration--two flails that beat up the dust of his mind in the absence of any sound grain of evidence. Of these, the first was a certain hyperbolic expression used and reiterated by yesterday’s rogue--a preposterous inquiry that had yet seemed instinct with a subtle undermeaning, and, so weighted, had sung and buzzed ever since in the eavesdropper’s brain. “The Lake of Wine!” The term had been surely employed to cover or suggest a tangible fact. Its persistent repetition by Mr. Joe Corby precluded the idea that it was merely an accidental fancy played upon for the girl’s behoof. Then, what was its interpretation?--to what did it allude? Beyond the surmise that it must refer to something concealed upon, or connected with, his bugbear property, it was obviously impracticable for him to reach. So, rebounding from a blank wall of speculation, he would stumble against his second trouble. This, in its essence, was nothing but a fear, or the shadow of one. It amounted to sounds about the house of a night--sounds indistinctly acknowledged by a consciousness on the borderland of slumber and acute to nice impressions of the senses. He could recall them thundering on the drum of his visionary ear, and could remember starting up wildly awake to be aware of nothing in all the atmosphere of his room but a ticking silence. Still, the feeling would remain that something had been moving, creeping, breathing in his neighbourhood only a moment earlier; and more than once he had risen, with a wet forehead, to satisfy himself that he had been merely dreaming. This recurrent uneasiness he had experienced on every night but the first of his inhabitance of the room; and it was beginning to thread his being with a little strand of nervousness. Oddly he felt himself in some telepathic way to be the centre of a nebulous mystery without having the remotest idea as to what was its nature. But his present lot was so strange, his position so isolated, that, even as a fearless man, he felt he was justified in adopting some nice precautions against the possibility of midnight surprises.