"How do you like the
beetles? You'll never see the end of them till--"

But Gladys rang off. On her return home something scuttled across the hall floor in front
of her. She sprang back with a scream. It was a gigantic cockroach. The hall was full of them. She summoned the servants, and they set to
work to kill them. But they might as well have tried to stop Niagara,
for as fast as they squashed one battalion, another took its place. They came out of cracks in the floor, from behind the wainscoting,
from every conceivable place in the kitchens, and in a dense black
ribbon some six inches broad, ascended the staircase. Gladys tried to
barricade her room against them, but it was of no avail. They came
from under the boards of the floor and poured down the chimney. They
swarmed over the furniture, in the cupboards, chest of drawers, the
washstand (where they kept continually falling into the water), in her
clothes (her dressing-gown was covered with them), over the bed, and
the climax was reached when they approached the chair she stood on. Too fascinated with horror to move, she watched them crawling up to
her. She was thus found by her father. He had come to her assistance
in the very nick of time, and after lifting her from the chair and
taking her to a place, as yet safe from molestation, returned to her
room, where, with savage blows, smashing, equally, beetles and
furniture, he remained till daybreak. With the first streak of dawn the beetles decamped, and the fray
ended. The work of devastation had been colossal. Corpses were strewn
everywhere--and it took the combined household hours, before all
evidences of the slaughter were obliterated. As for Gladys, she had
not slept all night and was a wreck. "I can never go through another night of it," she said to Miss
Templeton. "Do you think we shall ever get rid of the horrible
things?" "We can but try, dear!" Miss Templeton said consolingly, and she
accompanied Gladys up to town, where they inquired of doctors, and
chemists, and all sorts of possible and impossible people; and
returned to Kew laden with chemicals, and patent beetle destroyers. But though they tried remedies by the score, none were of use, and the
beetles repeated their performance of the preceding night. Gladys did not go to bed: surrounded with lighted candles, she sat on
the top of a wardrobe till daybreak. The following morning the house
was fumigated with sulphur; and people were told off to kill the
cockroaches, as they made their escape out of doors. By this means an
enormous number were killed; but at night they were just as bad as
before. An engineer friend then suggested a freezing-machine. The temperature
of the house was reduced to ten degrees below zero; the pipes froze
(and burst next day), the milk froze, the housemaid's toes and the
cook's little finger of the left hand froze, everything froze; and
presumably the beetles froze, for there was not one to be seen. However, it was quite impossible to resort again to this extreme
measure. John Martin had the most agonizing attacks of lumbago. Gladys
had neuralgia, and Miss Templeton--a slight touch of pleurisy. When Gladys reached the Imperial that evening, she found that the
staff had been battling with cockroaches all day, and that they had at
last succeeded in getting rid of them with a fumigation mixture of
camphor, cocculus, sulphur, bezonia and assafoetida--suggested to them
by a Hindoo student. For the next week not a beetle was to be seen at the theatre nor at
the Cottage; and Gladys was beginning to hope that Hamar had ceased
plaguing her (in despair of ever winning her), when the persecutions
suddenly broke out again. She had been in bed about half an hour, and was falling into a gentle
and much needed sleep, when a tremendous rap at the wall, close to her
head, awoke her with a start, and set her heart pulsating violently. Thinking it must be some one on the landing, she got up and lit a
candle. There was no one there. The moment she got into bed again, the
rapping was repeated, and it continued, at intervals, all night. This
went on for a week, during which time Gladys was never once able to
sleep. A brief respite ensued; but it was abruptly terminated one morning,
when Gladys awoke feeling as if some big insect were attempting to
penetrate her body. Uttering a shriek of terror, she whipped the
clothes from her, and sprang out of bed. Miss Templeton, who slept in
the next room, came rushing in, and they both saw an enormous insect,
half beetle and half scorpion, dart under the pillow. John Martin was
fetched, but although he searched everywhere, not a trace of the
insect could be found. That night, directly Gladys got in bed and blew out the light, she
heard a ticking sound on the sheets, and a huge insect with long hairy
legs ran up her sleeve. Her shrieks brought the whole household to the
room, but the insect was nowhere to be seen. She was thus plagued for nearly a fortnight. One insect only--never a
number, but only one, of prodigious size and terrifying form--appeared
to her in the least suspected places, _i.e._, on the dressing-table or
chimney-piece, in her shoes, or pockets; crawled over her in the dark;
and could never be caught. These perpetual frights, and consequent sleeplessness, wore Gladys
out. She grew so ill that she had to give up acting, and go into a
home to try the rest cure. Hamar then communicated with her, through a third person, and offered
to leave off tormenting her, if she would agree to be engaged to him. "I never will!" she said. "Then I will never leave off persecuting you," was his retort. But he was wary. He had no wish to kill her or to damage her looks--so
he let her get well and remain thus for a brief space. When she was
once again in full vigour, acting at the Imperial, he recommenced his
unwelcome attentions. At first he confined his new plague to the servants at the Cottage. The cook was one day turning out a drawer in the kitchen dresser, when
she was horrified out of her senses to find squatting there, a large,
black toad, which stared most malevolently at her, and then sprang in
her face. She shrieked to the housemaid to help her kill it, but
before a weapon could be got, the creature had bounced through an open
window, and disappeared. After this incident the servants knew no peace. Their bedclothes were
thrown off them at night, their dresses torn and bespattered with ink,
their brushes and combs thrown out of the window, and the water they
poured out to wash in was sometimes quite black, sometimes full of a
bright green sediment, and sometimes boiling, when it invariably
cracked both the jug and basin. Unable to stand these annoyances the servants left in a body. Their
successors fared the same, and worse.