“Well, she agreed to sleep in her mother’s room, and I went away relieved. So soon as I returned to the fire in the dining-room I began to think of poor Tom Singleton. I felt curiously excited, and I knew that it would be useless for me to go to bed,—in fact, I made up my mind not to leave the dining-room for some hours, at any rate, and when the landlord came to turn out the lights I told him he might trust me to do that duty for him. He left me alone in the room about half-past eleven o’clock. When the sound of his feet upon the oaken stairs died away I felt as fearful as a child in the dark. I lit another cigar and walked about the room for some time. I went to the window that opened upon the old Priory ground, and, seeing that the night was a fine one, I opened the door and strolled out, hoping that the cool air would do me good. I had not gone many yards across the little patch of green before I turned and looked up at the house—at the last window, the window of that room. A fire had been lighted in the room early in the evening, and its glow shone through the white blind. Suddenly that faint glow increased to a terrific glare,—a red glare, Jim,—and then there came before my eyes for a moment the shadow of two figures upon the blind,—one the figure of a woman, the other—God knows what it was. I rushed back to the room, but before I had reached the door I heard the horrible laughter once again. It seemed to come from that room and to pass on through the air into the distance across the river. I ran upstairs with a light, and found Sylvia and her mother standing together with wraps around them at the door of the room. ‘Thank God, you are safe!’ I managed to cry. ‘I feared that you had returned to the room.’ ‘You heard it—that awful laughter?’ she whispered. ‘You heard it, and you saw something—what was it?’ I gently forced her and her mother back to their room, for the servants and the landlord’s family were now crowding into the corridor. They, too, had heard enough to alarm them.”
“You went to the room?”
“The scene of that dreadful morning was repeated. The door was locked on the inside. We broke it in and found a girl lying dead on the floor, her face contorted just as poor Singleton’s was. She was Sylvia’s maid, and it was thought that, on hearing that her mistress was not going to occupy the room, she had gone into it herself on account of the fire which had been lighted there.”
“And the doctor said——?”
“Cardiac attack—the same as before—singular coincidence! I need scarcely say that we never slept again under that accursed roof. Poor Sylvia! She was overwhelmed at the thought of how narrow her escape had been.”
“Did you notice anything remarkable about the room—about the shutters of the window?” I asked.
He looked at me curiously for a moment. Then he bent forward and said—
“On the edge of the shutter there were some curious marks where the wood had been charred.”
“As if a hand with a red-hot gauntlet had been laid upon it?”
“There were the marks of two such hands,” said my friend slowly.