Yet this feeling of dread was mingled with a sense of fascination: his tortured mind was like a singed moth which returns again and again to the burning lamp. As Mr. Bradley spoke he became conscious that he was describing all that had taken place last night as accurately as if he had been present in the room. He seemed to have divined that Grif had been afraid, that the looking-glass had glittered, that the shadows had grown alive, that his room had been invaded by a ghostly activity, which had permitted him to drop asleep only that it might draw him more certainly out into the darkness. And when he spoke now, it was no longer of a secret playmate, of a happy boy and of the open sky, but of an enemy, a beast hungry for its prey, a crouching cruel antagonist. Grif had ceased altogether to reply to him. He lay perfectly still, his dark eyes wide and troubled, while Mr. Bradley told him dismal tales whose very craziness seemed to make them more real. And as his low voice vibrated with a curious, passionate gluttony, the churchyard, no longer green and pleasant, but a place of grisly horrors, seemed to creep closer and closer to them, till at last its white tombs lay just beneath the window. “I will tell you how I first came to be certain of these things,” the organist whispered, drawing nearer and bending down, while his long thin fingers curved and straightened themselves on the bright counterpane, and his eyes glittered into Grif’s. “I must go back a good many years, to an autumn night long ago, when a young man, walking home through the streets, began to watch his shadow gliding over the ground in the light of the gas lamps. It was not till he was half way home that he noticed how unfamiliar it looked, and then something about it attracted his attention and he stood still. A strange, a horrible thought had entered his mind. He struggled against it as people struggle against a bad dream. Then he hurried on, and looked at his shadow again as seldom as possible. “When he reached home he felt a little ashamed, and yet he still had a lingering sense of uneasiness and depression. He went straight to bed, and it was later than usual when, next day, he woke out of a heavy stupid sleep. Immediately he knew that something had happened, that he had learned some secret――a secret he did not want to think of, but which he could not forget. He went out after breakfast. The sun was shining; the streets were full of people. ‘I won’t look,’ he said; but a moment later he cast a hurried glance at a whitewashed wall he was passing, and on the wall he saw the shadow.