‘Where did it occur?’ I asked.

‘Here, in your own town,’ said Mivart.  ’A most extraordinary case.  My report will delight Marini, our great authority, as you no doubt are aware, on catalepsy and cataleptic ecstasy.’

‘Strange that I have heard nothing of it!’ I said.

‘Oh!’ replied Mivart, ’it occurred only this morning.  Some fishermen passing below the old church were attracted, first by a shriek of a peculiarly frightful and unearthly kind, and then by some unusual appearance on the sands, at the spot where the last landslip took place.’

My pulses stopped in a moment, and I clung to the back of my chair.

‘What—­did—­the fishermen see?’ I gasped.

‘The men landed,’ continued Mivart,—­too much interested in the case to observe my emotion,—­’and there they found a dead body—­the body of the missing organist here, who had apparently fallen with the landslip.  The face was horribly distorted by terror, the skull shattered, and around the neck was slung a valuable cross made of precious stones.  But the most interesting feature of the case is this, that in front of the body, in a fit of a remarkable kind, squatted his daughter—­you may have seen her, an exceedingly pretty girl lately come from Wales or somewhere—­and on her face was reflected and mimicked, in the most astonishing way, the horrible expression on the face of the corpse, while the fingers of her right hand were so closely locked around the cross—­’

I felt that from my mouth there issued a voice not mine—­a long smothered shriek like that which had seemed to issue from my mouth on that awful night when, looking out of the window, I had heard the noise of the landslip.  Then I felt myself whispering ‘The Curse!’ Then I knew no more.

XIII

I had another dangerous relapse, and was delirious for two days, I think.  When I came to myself, the first words I uttered to Mivart, whom I found with me, were inquiries about Winifred.  He was loth at first to revive the subject, though he supposed that the effect of his narrative upon me had arisen partly from my weakness and partly from what he called his ‘sensational way’ of telling the story. (My mother had been very careful to drop no hint of the true state of the case.) At last, however, Mivart told me all he knew about Winifred, while I hid my face in my pillow and listened.

‘In the seizures (which are recurrent) the girl,’ he said, ’mimics the expression of terror on her father’s face.  Between the paroxysms she lapses into a strange kind of dementia.  It is as though her own mind had fled and the body had been entered by the soul of a child.  She will then sing snatches of songs, sometimes in Welsh and sometimes in English, but with the strange, weird intonation of a person in a dream.  I have known something like this to take place before, but it has been in seizures of an epileptic kind, very unlike this case in their general characteristics.  The mental processes seem to have been completely arrested by the shock, as the wheels of a watch or a musical box are stopped if it falls.’