"'I'll not mention it,' she said quietly, 'but for all that you won't keep them.'
"'And why not?' I snapped.
"'The tradesmen,' she answered.. 'When they call of a morning— they'll talk. They'll tell the cook what happened here three years ago. They'll tell her that you may hear strange sounds and see strange things in this house, and she will believe them.'
"'Exactly,' I said bitterly. 'And then they promptly will begin to hear strange sounds. Whereas if nothing was said to them they wouldn't.'
"'Maybe,' she answered. 'Maybe not.'
"She took a step towards me, almost her first movement since the interview had started. 'There's something, Mr. Morgan, that threatens this house. Don't ask me what it is, for that I can't tell you. I don't know myself. But it's there—it's always there. That I do know.'
"And the next instant she was gone, and I was alone in the cheerful sunlight. Now, what would any of you have done in my place? Probably just what I did—cursed furiously. While she had been with me her strange personality had impressed me in spite of myself; now that she had gone I merely remembered the stupid vapourings of a silly woman. And a servantless future. She wouldn't be able to hold her tongue, for all her promise to the contrary, when she met the servants. Not she; she wasn't the type. And there and then I determined that whatever else happened there should be no overlap. Mrs. Gulliver should be out of the house before the servants came in, even if it did mean some inconvenience to us. In ordinary circumstances, of course, we should have had the house open, with the servants installed, all ready for us on our return from our honeymoon. Now I decided that we would keep on Mrs. Gulliver until we came back, and then get rid of her one morning and bring the servants in in the afternoon. I felt that tradesmen's boys were, at any rate, less likely to unsettle the staff than that sombre-eyed woman."
The fair-haired man took a sip of his drink and knocked out his pipe.
"Well," he continued, "we returned. Two months ago, almost to a day, we returned."
Mrs. Gulliver was at the door to meet us, and we spent the afternoon in exploring the house. Everything was perfectly charming, and my wife was delighted. In fact, the only fly in the ointment was Mrs. Gulliver's cooking. I hadn't told my wife of the conversation I had had with the woman, and I had taken the first opportunity—when I saw Mrs. Gulliver alone—of telling her that if she said one word to my wife of what she had said to me a death by violence would occur in the house and her prophecy would be fulfilled. Because my wife thought that my idea of not having any overlap was merely due to my wish to prevent Mrs. Gulliver giving gruesome details of the murder to the servants, which might unsettle them.
"That, then, was the position when we arrived back at the house. The servants were due in three days, and until then we should have to put up with the cooking.
"Well, as I've said before, it was a charming little place. I spent the next day pottering around with my wife, planning out improvements in the garden, and the more I saw of it the less I thought of Mrs. Gulliver's strange words to me a few weeks previously. She had said nothing more, but then, save for one brief interview when I had sworn her to silence, I had not seen her alone. Her face was expressionless, and she performed her work—save the cooking—quietly and efficiently.
"The following day I had to go up to London. There were a lot of arrears of work waiting for me in the office, and I only just got back in time for dinner. And the first thing I noticed was that my wife seemed a little thoughtful and preoccupied.
"'Marjorie Thurston came to see me this afternoon,' she said as we sat down.
"Mrs. Thurston was a pal of hers who lived at Ascot.
"'And what had she got to say for herself?' I asked.
"'Jack,' she said, 'I rather wish we hadn't taken this house.'
"I swore under my breath, and consigned Mrs. Thurston elsewhere. I could guess what she had been saying.
"'She gave me the details of the murder," went on my wife. Perfectly horrible. A brute of a man who lived here and killed his wife. He— and I could see that she was looking a bit white—'he cut off her head.'
"'Well, my dear,' I said prosaically, 'it seems to me that if you're going to murder someone it doesn't much matter how you do it. The result is much the same.'
"'Oh, I know that,' she cried. 'But it all seems so horrible. And they say that he haunts the place.'
"'Confound Marjorie Thurston,' I said angrily. 'She'd got no right to fill you up with a cock-and-bull story of that sort. You don't believe it, of course?'
"'No, of course not,' she answered, but it wasn't a very convincing No. 'It's the servants I'm thinking of. They're bound to hear of it.'
"'Let's leave that trouble till it comes,' I said.
"And on the surface, at any rate, we did leave it. We discussed the moving of furniture to different places, and what particular car we were going to buy, and a hundred and one other things, till it was time to go to bed. In fact, I thought she had forgotten about it, until I noticed her glance over her shoulder suddenly as we went upstairs. The hall was in darkness, and she clutched my arm.
"'Jack,' she whispered, 'Jack—don't you feel it?'
"'Feel what?' I said, impressed in spite of myself.
"'Something evil,' she said, and her voice was shaking. 'Horrible and black. It's gone now, but—'
"With a little shiver she went on up the stairs, and I followed her. And you can take it from me that for the first time in my life I was annoyed with her. I had felt absolutely nothing, and I put it down to imagination. I didn't say anything. I didn't see that there was any good to be gained by doing so. But the thing annoyed me. If she was going to give way to these hysterical fears, there certainly would be no chance of keeping any servants.
"However, she said nothing more, and when the next morning dawned bright and sunny she seemed to be her normal self again. Which was a relief, seeing that I had to go up to London again.
"But before I went I asked Mrs. Gulliver if she had said anything to my wife. She absolutely denied it, and denied it so quietly and convincingly that I believed her. And in view of what happened, gentlemen, that fact is an interesting one. Mark you, I advance no explanation, and yet it seems clear to me that two people—my wife and Mrs. Gulliver—both experienced the same sensation in that house. I have since asked my wife if she thought she saw or heard anything in the hall, and her answer is that she did not. In fact, the nearest that I can get to her sensation is that she suddenly felt herself opposed by a dreadful malign influence—one that wished her harm. She is positive that it was not imagination: she says that the sudden sensation was so marked as to be almost physical. Now, if her experience on the stairs had been due to what Mrs. Thurston had told her that afternoon, my contention is that she would have been affected differently. If it indeed had been imagination, as I thought at the time, it would have taken a more material form. In fact, I believe that Mrs. Thurston represented—if I may put it that way—the errand-boy school of thought, which grew out of idle tittle-tattle. And I believe that my wife's experience that night was a manifestation of what Mrs. Gulliver had told me. In short, that the house was, in the accepted sense of the word, not haunted, but that there was a sinister influence present—which, if we knew more of the things that lie on the borderline, should have warned us of the terrible danger we were in."
The sweat was gleaming in beads on the fair-haired man's forehead, and his neglected pipe lay beside him on the table.
"Gentlemen," he said, "I still find it difficult to talk calmly of that next night. I was unavoidably detained in London till the last train, and what happened has been told me disjointedly by that poor child. God! when I think of it, it almost drives me mad!
"I'd telephoned through to her