And then I would laugh aloud and mock the voices of Fenella Stanley and Philip Aylwin and millions of other voices that echoed or murmured or bellowed through half a million years, echoed or murmured or bellowed from European halls and castles, from Gypsy tents, from caves of palæolithic man.

'How shall you stay the curse from working in the blood of the accursed one?' the voices would say. And then I would laugh again till I feared the people in the hotel would hear me and take me for a maniac.

But then my aunt's picture of a beggar-girl standing in the rain would fill my eyes and the whispers would grow louder than the voice of the North Sea in the March wind: 'Look at that. How dare you leave undone anything, howsoever wild, which might seem to any one—even to an illiterate Gypsy, even to a crazy mystic—a means of finding Winifred? What is the meaning of the great instinct which has always conquered the soul in its direst need—which has always driven man when in the grip of unbearable calamity to believe in powers that are unseen? What though that scientific reason of yours tells you that Winifred's misfortunes have nothing to do with any curse? what though your reason tells you that all these calamities may be read as being the perfectly natural results of perfectly natural causes? Is the voice of man's puny reason clothed with such authority that it dares to answer his heart, which knows nothing but that it bleeds? The terrible facts of the case may be read in two ways. With an inscrutable symmetry these facts may and do fit in with the universal theory of the power of the spirit-world to execute a curse from the grave. Look at that beggar in the street! How dare you ignore the theory of the sorrowing soul, the logic of the lacerated heart, even though your reason laughs it to scorn?'

And then at last my laughter would turn to moans, and, replacing the cross in the cabinet, I would creep hack to my bed ashamed, like a guilty thing—ashamed before myself.

But the more I felt at my throat the claws of the ancestral ogre Superstition, the more enraged I became with myself for feeling them there. And the auger against my ancestors' mysticism grew with the growing consciousness that I was rapidly yielding to the very same mysticism myself. And then I would get up again and take from my escritoire the sheaf of Fenella Stanley's letters which I had brought from Raxton, and read again those stories about curses, such as that about the withering of a Romany family under a dead man's curse which Winnie had described to me that night on the sands.

II

I was delighted to be told by Sleaford, whom I met one afternoon in Piccadilly, that Cyril had returned to London within the last few days. 'He is appointed artist-in-chief of the new comic paper, The Caricaturist, said Sleaford, 'and is in great feather. I have just been calling upon him.'

'The very man I want to see,' I replied. Sleaford thereupon directed me to Cyril's studio 'You'll find him at work,' said he, 'doin' a caricature of Wilderspin's great picture, "Faith and Love." Mother Gudgeon is sittin' as his model. He does everything from models, you know.'

'Mother Gudgeon?'

'A female costermonger that he picked up some where in the slums, the funniest woman in London: haw! haw! I promise you she'll make you laugh when Cyril draws her out.'