"The cellars were fairly well lighted by two grated windows, and a horrible sight met my eyes. There stood the wife, bending under the weight of her husband, who was suspended by a rope round his neck from the great beam overhead. One glance at the hideously distorted face, the glazed eyes protruding from their sockets, the gaping mouth and swollen tongue, told me the worst.
"Hastily I severed the rope, and the wife and her dead husband sank to the ground together.
"There was little to be done. We laid the corpse flat on the stone floor, and I persuaded her to leave it and come upstairs with me, and wait for the arrival of the doctor and police. This she consented to do. She was very quiet and composed, a curious apathy of indifference possessed her, and I would far rather have seen her in floods of natural tears.
"By evening the house had fallen into a dead silence. The doctor had pronounced life to be extinct, and the corpse had been carried up to an unused bedroom immediately over the smoking-room. The police found that the mill owner had committed suicide by hanging. He had jumped off a stone slab, after having adjusted the rope to the beam and his own throat. With the exception of an old nurse who was devoted to her mistress, the servants all departed in a body, and the house was left brooding under a weight of intolerable depression.
"I did not blame the servants. As a matter of fact, there was nothing I would have liked better than to quit the mill house there and then, and never set foot in it again, but I had the desolate widow to consider. I could not leave her alone, whilst there was still the smallest possibility of my being of use. Added to this I had the queerest feeling that she required protection, though from what I would have been at a loss to say.
"Another feeling, which I combated violently, was a sensation of being mocked and jeered at by some unseen entity. I was being urged to get out of the house, to recognize my own impotence, to mind my own business, and when I metaphorically replied, 'Get thee behind me, Satan,' I could have sworn I heard a sly laugh.
"Of course I told myself all this was but the result of a shock to the nerves, and I was not going to pay any attention to it, so despite my intense longing to run out of the house I settled down with the daily paper, a cigarette, and a novel in the smoking-room, and resolutely turned my thoughts away from the tragedy.
"The widow, and her old nurse, who had promised me not to leave her mistress for a moment, had retired together for the night, so I felt satisfied, so far as they were concerned.
"I suppose I must have dozed off, for I was suddenly roused broad awake by footsteps overhead, in the room where the corpse lay. I sat up straight and listened intently. Were my nerves playing tricks with me? No; certainly not. There was no mistaking that sound for hallucination. It was perfectly clear and distinct. A man was walking about overhead, and the only man save myself within these walls had hanged himself by the neck until he was dead. There it was—the sound. A man's footsteps pacing slowly up and down the floor of the bedroom above, from end to end, backwards and forwards.
"I considered what I had better do. I was sure the widow and the old nurse were in the bedroom, quite at the other end of the house. Probably they were both asleep. I hoped so. What had I better do—nothing? Yet this inaction irked me. My curiosity was intense. The supernatural had never occupied much of my thoughts, but now it began to do so. Those steps must proceed from the supernatural. There was no other explanation. I was the only live man in the house.