"You," I rejoined, all afire with the prospect of listening to her remarkable voice in what I had every reason to believe would call forth its full expression. "Only let me look at those sheets first, and understand as perfectly as I may, just what it is you are going to read to me." "It's an explanation written for his heirs by Mr. Ocumpaugh. The story itself," she went on, handing me over the papers she held, "begins abruptly. From the way the sheet is torn across at the top, I judge that the narrative itself was preceded by some introductory words now lacking. When I have read it to you, I will tell you what I think those introductory words were." I handed back the sheets. There seemed to be a spell in the air--possibly it arose from her manner, which was one to rouse expectation even in one whose imagination had not already been stirred by a visit at night and in more than commonly bewildering company to the place whose dark and hitherto unknown secret I was about to hear. "I am ready," I said, feeling my strange position, but not anxious to change it just then for any other conceivable one. She drew a deep breath; again fixed me with her strange, compelling eyes, and with the final remark: "The present no longer exists, we are back in the seventies--" began this enthralling tale. I did not move till the last line dropped from her lips. XI THE SECRET OF THE OLD PAVILION I was as sane that night as I had ever been in my life. I am quite sure of this, though I had had a merry time enough earlier in the evening with my friends in the old pavilion (that time-honored retreat of my ancestors), whose desolation I had thought to dissipate with a little harmless revelry. Wine does not disturb my reason--the little wine I drank under that unwholesome roof--nor am I a man given to sudden excitements or untoward impulses. Yet this thing happened to me. It was after leaving the pavilion. My companions had all ridden away and I was standing on the lawn beyond my library windows, recalling my pleasure with them and gazing somewhat idly, I own, at that bare portion of the old wall where the tree fell a year ago (the place where the moon strikes with such a glitter when it rides high, as it did that night), when--believe it or not, it is all one to me--I became conscious of a sudden mental dread, inexplicable and alarming, which, seizing me after an hour of unmixed pleasure and gaiety, took such a firm grip upon my imagination that I fain would have turned my back upon the night and its influences, only my eyes would not leave that open space of wall where I now saw pass--not the shadow, but the veritable body of a large, black, hungry-looking dog, which, while I looked, turned into the open gateway connecting with the pavilion and disappeared. With it went the oppression which held me spell-bound. The ice melted from my blood; I could move my limbs, and again control my thoughts and exercise my will.