“Why are you whispering?” “Because we may be overheard. Because there is danger, very great danger!” “Danger—from whom?” “Come closer, please! I am so afraid they will hear! Can’t you place me at all? If you are still at the door—are you?” “Yes.” “Then come forward to the right, only a few steps, and then wait.” Now it has already been pointed out in these pages that the dark is paramountly deceptive. Barrison could not accurately locate the woman who was whispering to him; neither could he entirely identify the voice itself. If you will try the experiment of asking a number of different people to assemble in pitch darkness and each whisper the same thing, you will probably find that it is painfully easy to mistake your bitterest enemy for your very nearest and dearest friend. Jim Barrison had no soul thrill, nor any other sort of evidence, to assure him that the woman in the dark room was Grace Templeton; on the other hand, there was nothing to prove her any one else. And yet—and yet—he had a curious, creeping feeling of dread and suspicion. He did not trust this unknown, unidentified, whispering voice in the darkness. It came again then, like the very darkness itself made audible; insistent, soft, yet indefinitely sinister: “Come! Come here to me! Only a few steps forward and just a little to the right.” Barrison took one single step forward, and then stopped suddenly. He did not know what stopped him. He only knew that he _was_ stopped, as effectually and as imperatively as if some one in supreme authority had put out a stern, restraining hand before him. And then, all at once, something happened—one of those tiny things that sometimes carry such huge results on their filmy wings. The whisper came again, more urgently this time: “Aren’t you going to come to me, when I’m in danger?” When people are born in the West, they carry certain things away from it with them, and it matters not how long they are gone nor in what far parts they choose to roam, they never get rid of those special gifts of their native soil. One is the slightly emphasized “r” of ordinary speech. No Easterner can correctly mimic it; no Westerner can ever get away from it except when painstakingly acting, and endeavoring to forget that to which he was born. The two r’s in the one brief sentence were of the nature to brand any one as a Westerner. And Barrison knew that Grace Templeton had never spoken with the ghost of such an accent in her life. Who was it whom he had heard speak recently who did accentuate her r’s like that? Marita did! And one other—though much more delicately and——