Stooping, the woman made pretence to kiss the lips of some one who was lying just beneath her. It might have been that to her the thing was no pretence, and that, as in a vision, the dead lips did indeed touch hers. Then, drawing herself erect again, she broke into another of her discordant laughs. Throwing out her arms on either side of her, she exclaimed in strident tones: "Ghosts! Ghosts! The place is full of them--I see them everywhere. I touch them, hear them all the time. They've been with me all through the years, wherever I've been--and where haven't I been? My God--in heaven and hell! crowds and crowds of them, more and more as the years went on. And do you think that I can't see them here--in their house, and mine! Can't you see them too?" Madge replied between set lips--she had been forming her own conclusions while the woman raved: "No, I do not see them. Nor would you were you not under the influence of drink." The woman stared at her in what seemed genuine surprise. "Under the influence of drink! Me? No such luck! I wish I were." Again she gave one of those bursts of laughter which so jarred on Madge's nerves. "When I'm drunk I can't see ghosts--it's only when I'm sober. I've had nothing to eat since I don't know when, let alone to drink. I'm starving, starving! That's the time when I see ghosts. They point at me with their fingers and say, 'Look at us and look at you--this is what it's come to!' They make me see what might have been. He made me come to-day; I didn't want to, but he made me. And now he's in all the house.--Listen! He's getting out of bed in the room upstairs--that's his bedroom. Can't you hear his lame foot moving about the floor? How often I've thrown that lame foot in his face when I've been wild!--can't you hear it hobble--hobble?" "You are mad! How dare you talk such nonsense? There's no one in the house but you and I." The woman seemed to believe so implicitly in the diseased imaginings of her conscience-haunted brain, that Madge felt that unless she made a resolute effort her own mental equilibrium might totter. On the other's face there came a look of shrewd, malignant cunning. "Isn't there! That's all you know,--I'm no more mad than you are. And I tell you what--he's not the only thing that's in the house. There's something else as well. It was his, and now it's mine. And don't you think to rob me." "Rob you?--I." "Yes, you. There's others after it as well as you--I know! I'm not the simpleton that some may think. But I won't be robbed by all the lot of you--you make no error. It was his, and now it's mine." "If there really is anything in the house to which you have the slightest shadow of a claim, which I very much doubt, and let me know what it is, and where it is, I'll see that you have it without fail." A look of vacancy came on the woman's face. She passed her hand across her brow.