I think it
must have been that--oh! I’m sure it was that. But I’m glad I asked her
to dine. I mean to like her. I shan’t have a ‘turn’ again, shall I?”

“No, certainly not,” I said.... If the Queen refrained from taking the
tempting Knight----

“Oh, do stop your silly chess-problem!” said Madge. “Bite him, Fungus!”

Fungus, so called because he is the son of Humour and Gustavus
Adolphus, rose from his place on the hearthrug, and with a horse laugh
nuzzled against my leg, which is his way of biting those he loves. Then
the most amiable of bull-dogs, who has a passion for the human race,
lay down on my foot and sighed heavily. But Madge evidently wanted to
talk, and I pushed the chessboard away. “Tell me more about the horror,” I said. “It was just horror,” she said--“a sort of sickness of the soul.”... I found my brain puzzling over some vague reminiscence, surely
connected with Mrs. Acres, which those words mistily evoked. But next
moment that train of thought was cut short, for the old and sinister
legend about the Gate-house came into my mind as accounting for the
horror of which Madge spoke. In the days of Elizabethan religious
persecutions it had, then newly built, been inhabited by two brothers,
of whom the elder, to whom it belonged, had Mass said there every
Sunday. Betrayed by the younger, he was arrested and racked to death. Subsequently the younger, in a fit of remorse, hanged himself in the
panelled parlour. Certainly there was a story that the house was
haunted by his strangled apparition dangling from the beams, and the
late tenants of the house (which now had stood vacant for over three
years) had quitted it after a month’s occupation, in consequence, so it
was commonly said, of unaccountable and horrible sights. What was more
likely, then, than that Madge, who from childhood has been intensely
sensitive to occult and psychic phenomena, should have caught, on that
strange wireless receiver which is characteristic of “sensitives,” some
whispered message? “But you know the story of the house,” I said. “Isn’t it quite possible
that something of that may have reached you? Where did you sit, for
instance? In the panelled parlour?”

She brightened at that. “Ah, you wise man!” she said. “I never thought of that. That may
account for it all. I hope it does. You shall be left in peace with
your chess for being so brilliant.”

       *       *       *       *       *

I had occasion half an hour later to go to the post-office, a hundred
yards up the High Street, on the matter of a registered letter which
I wanted to despatch that evening. Dusk was gathering, but the red
glow of sunset still smouldered in the west, sufficient to enable me
to recognise familiar forms and features of passers-by. Just as I came
opposite the post-office there approached from the other direction a
tall, finely built woman, whom, I felt sure, I had never seen before. Her destination was the same as mine, and I hung on my step a moment
to let her pass in first. Simultaneously I felt that I knew, in some
vague, faint manner, what Madge had meant when she talked about a
“sickness of the soul.” It was no nearer realisation to me than is the
running of a tune in the head to the audible external hearing of it,
and I attributed my sudden recognition of her feeling to the fact that
in all probability my mind had subconsciously been dwelling on what
she had said, and not for a moment did I connect it with any external
cause. And then it occurred to me who, possibly, this woman was....

She finished the transaction of her errand a few seconds before me, and
when I got out into the street again she was a dozen yards down the
pavement, walking in the direction of my house and of the Gate-house. Opposite my own door I deliberately lingered, and saw her pass down the
steps that led from the road to the entrance of the Gate-house. Even as
I turned into my own door the unbidden reminiscence which had eluded
me before came out into the open, and I cast my net over it. It was
her husband, who, in the inexplicable communication he had left on his
dressing-room table, just before he shot himself, had written “my soul
sickens.” It was odd, though scarcely more than that, for Madge to have
used those identical words. *       *       *       *       *

Charles Alington, my wife’s brother, who arrived next afternoon, is
quite the happiest man whom I have ever come across. The material
world, that perennial spring of thwarted ambition, physical desire,
and perpetual disappointment, is practically unknown to him. Envy,
malice, and all uncharitableness are equally alien, because he does
not want to obtain what anybody else has got, and has no sense of
possession, which is queer, since he is enormously rich. He fears
nothing, he hopes for nothing, he has no abhorrences or affections,
for all physical and nervous functions are in him in the service of an
intense inquisitiveness. He never passed a moral judgment in his life,
he only wants to explore and to know. Knowledge, in fact, is his entire
preoccupation, and since chemists and medical scientists probe and mine
in the world of tinctures and microbes far more efficiently than he
could do, as he has so little care for anything that can be weighed or
propagated, he devotes himself, absorbedly and ecstatically, to that
world that lies about the confines of conscious existence. Anything not
yet certainly determined appeals to him with the call of a trumpet: he
ceases to take an interest in a subject as soon as it shows signs of
assuming a practical and definite status. He was intensely concerned,
for instance, in wireless transmission, until Signor Marconi proved
that it came within the scope of practical science, and then Charles
abandoned it as dull. I had seen him last two months before, when he
was in a great perturbation, since he was speaking at a meeting of
Anglo-Israelites in the morning, to show that the Scone Stone, which
is now in the Coronation Chair at Westminster, was for certain the
pillow on which Jacob’s head had rested when he saw the vision at
Bethel; was addressing the Psychical Research Society in the afternoon
on the subject of messages received from the dead through automatic
script, and in the evening was, by way of a holiday, only listening
to a lecture on reincarnation. None of these things could, as yet, be
definitely proved, and that was why he loved them. During the intervals
when the occult and the fantastic do not occupy him, he is, in spite of
his fifty years and wizened mien, exactly like a schoolboy of eighteen
back on his holidays and brimming with superfluous energy. I found Charles already arrived when I got home next afternoon, after a
round of golf. He was betwixt and between the serious and the holiday
mood, for he had evidently been reading to Madge from a journal
concerning reincarnation, and was rather severe to me....

“Golf!” he said, with insulting scorn. “What is there to know about
golf?