“Listen, you,” he said, and the words rose and burst from his throat like bubbles. “You have been a thorn in my foot ever since I trod this city. If yours wasn’t the act, you were the cause. I would have killed you both on the spot--you and your accomplice--if the fire, blazing out on the curtains, had left me time. Now you shall know what it is to have made me desperate--desperate, do you understand, you fulsome cur? Better take a viper to bed with you than the thought of my revenge.” “Dr. Crackenthorpe,” I said, very coolly, “you are a ruffian and a blackguard. Which is the more desperate of us two is an open question. Anyhow, I fancy myself the stronger. There’s the door. If you remain this side of it after I have counted twelve you try conclusions with the mill-tail yonder.” I had struck a match while I spoke and kindled an oil lamp standing on a bracket. This wrestle with an evil soul had braced my nerves like a tonic. He slapped back against the passage wall, staring at me and gasping. His face, I saw, was grimed with smoke, and his coat scorched in places. I began to count, looking into his eyes, with a grim smile--had got as far as nine, without awakening movement on his part, when a deathly yell rung through the house and the words died on my lips. I felt the blood leave my face, sinking like water in snow. There was no mistaking the direction from which the sound had come. It issued from the haunted room--there from the black end of the passage--from the core of hideous night, whose silence no storm could penetrate. Once I looked at the face before me and saw my own terror reflected in it; then I sprung for the dreadful place, sick, at whatever cost, to solve the mystery of the cry. Groping for the heavy timbered door, I came suddenly upon a wide luminous square and almost fell into it. Then I saw, indeed, that the door itself was open and that a dim glow lighted the interior of the room. Something else I saw in the same instant--Duke, standing at the open mouth of the cupboard that inclosed the wheel--Duke, with a fearful smile on his white face, and his head bent as if he listened. And his black glowing eyes, set in pools of shadow, alone moved, fixing their gaze steadily on mine as I came into their vision. “Stop!” he said, in a clear, low voice. He need not have bidden me. My limbs seemed paralyzed--my heart stiffening with deadly foreboding of some approaching wickedness. A lighted lantern stood near him on the floor and threw a gigantic distorted shadow of him on the wall against the window. “Did you hear?” he said, in a whisper that thrilled to me where I stood. “Is it haunted, this room of yours? It seems so. Listen!” He leaned over and looked down into the pit, so that the upper half of his body was plunged in black shadow. Simultaneously an appalling scream rose from the depths and echoed away among the rafters above.