"It was your abrupt conversation with the priest at supper that first
put me upon the track of this remarkable occurrence," he heard the
man's quiet voice beside him in the darkness, "and it was from him I
learned after you left the story of the devil-worship that became
secretly established in the heart of this simple and devout little
community." "Devil-worship! Here--!" Harris stammered, aghast. "Yes--here;--conducted secretly for years by a group of Brothers before
unexplained disappearances in the neighbourhood led to its discovery. For where could they have found a safer place in the whole wide world
for their ghastly traffic and perverted powers than here, in the very
precincts--under cover of the very shadow of saintliness and holy
living?" "Awful, awful!" whispered the silk merchant, "and when I tell you the
words they used to me--"

"I know it all," the stranger said quietly. "I saw and heard everything. My plan first was to wait till the end and then to take steps for their
destruction, but in the interest of your personal safety,"--he spoke
with the utmost gravity and conviction,--"in the interest of the safety
of your soul, I made my presence known when I did, and before the
conclusion had been reached--"

"My safety! The danger, then, was real. They were alive and--" Words
failed him. He stopped in the road and turned towards his companion, the
shining of whose eyes he could just make out in the gloom. "It was a concourse of the shells of violent men, spiritually developed
but evil men, seeking after death--the death of the body--to prolong
their vile and unnatural existence. And had they accomplished their
object you, in turn, at the death of your body, would have passed into
their power and helped to swell their dreadful purposes." Harris made no reply. He was trying hard to concentrate his mind upon
the sweet and common things of life. He even thought of silk and St.
Paul's Churchyard and the faces of his partners in business. "For you came all prepared to be caught," he heard the other's voice
like some one talking to him from a distance; "your deeply introspective
mood had already reconstructed the past so vividly, so intensely, that
you were _en rapport_ at once with any forces of those days that chanced
still to be lingering. And they swept you up all unresistingly." Harris tightened his hold upon the stranger's arm as he heard. At the
moment he had room for one emotion only. It did not seem to him odd that
this stranger should have such intimate knowledge of his mind. "It is, alas, chiefly the evil emotions that are able to leave their
photographs upon surrounding scenes and objects," the other added, "and
who ever heard of a place haunted by a noble deed, or of beautiful and
lovely ghosts revisiting the glimpses of the moon? It is unfortunate. But the wicked passions of men's hearts alone seem strong enough to
leave pictures that persist; the good are ever too lukewarm." The stranger sighed as he spoke. But Harris, exhausted and shaken as he
was to the very core, paced by his side, only half listening. He moved
as in a dream still. It was very wonderful to him, this walk home under
the stars in the early hours of the October morning, the peaceful forest
all about them, mist rising here and there over the small clearings, and
the sound of water from a hundred little invisible streams filling in
the pauses of the talk. In after life he always looked back to it as
something magical and impossible, something that had seemed too
beautiful, too curiously beautiful, to have been quite true. And, though
at the time he heard and understood but a quarter of what the stranger
said, it came back to him afterwards, staying with him till the end of
his days, and always with a curious, haunting sense of unreality, as
though he had enjoyed a wonderful dream of which he could recall only
faint and exquisite portions. But the horror of the earlier experience was effectually dispelled; and
when they reached the railway inn, somewhere about three o'clock in the
morning, Harris shook the stranger's hand gratefully, effusively,
meeting the look of those rather wonderful eyes with a full heart, and
went up to his room, thinking in a hazy, dream-like way of the words
with which the stranger had brought their conversation to an end as they
left the confines of the forest--

"And if thought and emotion can persist in this way so long after the
brain that sent them forth has crumbled into dust, how vitally important
it must be to control their very birth in the heart, and guard them with
the keenest possible restraint." But Harris, the silk merchant, slept better than might have been
expected, and with a soundness that carried him half-way through the
day. And when he came downstairs and learned that the stranger had
already taken his departure, he realised with keen regret that he had
never once thought of asking his name. "Yes, he signed the visitors' book," said the girl in reply to his
question. And he turned over the blotted pages and found there, the last entry, in
a very delicate and individual handwriting--

"_John Silence_, London." CASE II: THE CAMP OF THE DOG


I

Islands of all shapes and sizes troop northward from Stockholm by the
hundred, and the little steamer that threads their intricate mazes in
summer leaves the traveller in a somewhat bewildered state as regards
the points of the compass when it reaches the end of its journey at
Waxholm. But it is only after Waxholm that the true islands begin, so to
speak, to run wild, and start up the coast on their tangled course of a
hundred miles of deserted loveliness, and it was in the very heart of
this delightful confusion that we pitched our tents for a summer
holiday. A veritable wilderness of islands lay about us: from the mere
round button of a rock that bore a single fir, to the mountainous
stretch of a square mile, densely wooded, and bounded by precipitous
cliffs; so close together often that a strip of water ran between no
wider than a country lane, or, again, so far that an expanse stretched
like the open sea for miles. Although the larger islands boasted farms and fishing stations, the
majority were uninhabited. Carpeted with moss and heather, their
coast-lines showed a series of ravines and clefts and little sandy bays,
with a growth of splendid pine-woods that came down to the water's edge
and led the eye through unknown depths of shadow and mystery into the
very heart of primitive forest. The particular islands to which we had camping rights by virtue of
paying a nominal sum to a Stockholm merchant lay together in a
picturesque group far beyond the reach of the steamer, one being a mere
reef with a fringe of fairy-like birches, and two others, cliff-bound
monsters rising with wooded heads out of the sea.