“I shouldn’t _tell_, even if I did find out,” said Palmer, coldly. “That is, unless he was dangerous. And I believe he is,” he added with a sudden change of tone. “I don’t see why otherwise he should have wanted to hurt me to-day. And he _did_ want to――pretty badly. If you’d just seen his eyes! I never saw anyone look like that before.” “Jim and Ann, it’s bedtime!” Aunt Caroline stood upon the threshold, surveying the assembly. “Grif, I think you had better go, too. In fact we’ll all be going soon, for I’m sure nobody got much sleep last night.” * * * * * Undressing by candlelight, Grif that evening for the first time regretted that he was not in the room with the other boys. For the first time he remembered what Aunt Caroline had told him about his sleeping quarters being so far away from those of the rest of the household. It was true he had Pouncer with him, but he should have liked somebody else as well, though nothing would have induced him to confess this, or ask to be moved. He felt a strange depression, a sort of shadow on his mind. The loneliness and the darkness weighed upon him, and the sound of the wind in the trees was unfriendly and forbidding. He was in a mood when everything turns to gloom, and when the sense of proportion is temporarily obliterated. He was sorry he had offended Palmer. Not knowing that that curious boy had already found solace in an envious appreciation of the methods of Doctor John Thorndyke, he magnified the offence till it was driven from his memory by vaguer and more ominous broodings. The physical lassitude which had been with him all day had turned at last to a kind of mental distemper. He had left his candle burning on a table by the bed, but the draught from the window bent and bowed the flame, causing it to throw black shadows on the wallpaper, and in this way bringing back to him, in a distorted and more terrible form, much of what Mr. Bradley had said that afternoon. The vague, fantastic danger Mr. Bradley had spoken of became a real danger. It was curious how much more meaning seemed to have come into the organist’s words now that Grif was alone with them in the silence of the sleeping house. He felt very tired. A heaviness of sleep weighed upon his eyes and on his brain, but a superstitious dread of what might happen should he lose consciousness kept him awake and alert. He listened for the sound of the flute, but the idea of hearing it had lost all beauty for him now, and he only listened because he could not help doing so. In his weariness, as he sat up against the propped pillows, his head would begin to nod, and then, just as he was dropping off, his fear would reawaken him. Every now and again his eyes slewed round, like the eyes of a frightened dog, towards the looking-glass, as if it, too, possessed a fatal fascination.