He stopped, and I got up with loose knees and went to the window. Better the black night than the intangible horror within. I flung up the sash and looked out across the moor. There was no light, nothing but an inky darkness and the uncanny rustle of elder-bushes. The sound chilled me, and I closed the window. "The land is the old Manann," Ladlaw was saying. "We are beyond the pale here. Do you hear the wind?" I forced myself back into sanity and looked at my watch. It was nearly one o'clock. "What ghastly idiots we are!" I said. "I am off to bed." Ladlaw looked at me helplessly. "For God's sake don't leave me alone!" he moaned. "Get Sybil." We went together back to the hall, while he kept the same feverish grip on my arm. Some one was sleeping in a chair by the hall-fire, and to my distress I recognised my hostess. The poor child must have been sadly wearied. She came forward with her anxious face. "I'm afraid Bob has kept you very late, Henry," she said. "I hope you will sleep well. Breakfast at nine, you know." And then I left them. Over my bed there was a little picture, a reproduction of some Italian work of Christ and the Demoniac. Some impulse made me hold my candle up to it. The madman's face was torn with passion and suffering, and his eye had the pained furtive look which I had come to know. And by his left side there was a dim shape crouching. I got into bed hastily, but not to sleep. I felt that my reason must be going. I had been pitchforked from our clear and cheerful modern life into the mists of old superstition. Old tragic stories of my Calvinist upbringing returned to haunt me. The man dwelt in by a devil was no new fancy; but I believed that Science had docketed and analysed and explained the Devil out of the world. I remembered my dabblings in the occult before I settled down to law--the story of Donisarius, the monk of Padua, the unholy legend of the Face of Proserpina, the tales of _succubi_ and _incubi_, the Leannain Sith and the Hidden Presence. But here was something stranger still. I had stumbled upon that very possession which fifteen hundred years ago had made the monks of New Rome tremble and cross themselves. Some devilish occult force, lingering through the ages, had come to life after a long sleep. God knows what earthly connection there was between the splendid Emperor of the World and my prosaic friend, or between the glittering shores of the Bosphorus and this moorland parish! But the land was the old Manann! The spirit may have lingered in the earth and air, a deadly legacy from Pict and Roman. I had felt the uncanniness of the place; I had augured ill of it from the first. And then in sheer disgust I rose and splashed my face with cold water.