was not a man to pause in order to make up his mind.  He had a strong feeling of responsibility towards his little station and its inexplicable tenant, therefore he hurried back against his will.  His only consolation in this backward walk was the key of the door he had locked, which in haste he had taken out and still held in his hand.  Without attempting to decide whether the thing he had seen was of common clay or of some lighter substance, he still did not lend his mind with sufficient readiness to ghostly theory to imagine that his unwelcome guest could pass through locked doors.

Nor did the ghost, if ghost it was, pass through unopened doors.  The flaw in Trenholme’s comfortable theory was that he had forgotten that the large double door, which opened from the baggage room to the railway track, was barred on the inside.  When he got back to his place he found this door ajar, and neither in his own room, nor in the baggage room, nor in the coffin, was there sign of human presence, living or dead.

All the world about lay in the clear white twilight.  The blueberry flats, the bramble-holts, were red.  The clouded sky was white, except for that metallic blue tinge in the west, through which, in some thin places, a pale glow of yellower light was now visible, the last rays of the day that had set.  It was this world on which the young Englishman looked as, amazed and somewhat affrighted, he walked round the building, searching on all sides for the creature that could hardly yet, had it run away in such a level land, be wholly out of sight.

He went indoors again to make sure that nothing was there, and this time he made a discovery—­his tea was gone from his cup.  He gave a shudder of disgust, and, leaving his food untouched, put on coat and cap, and went out shutting his door behind him.  His spirits sank.  It seemed to him that, had it been midnight instead of this blank, even daylight, had his unearthly-looking visitant acted in more unearthly fashion, the circumstances would have had less weird force to impress his mind.

We can, after all, only form conjectures regarding inexplicable incidents from the successive impressions that have been made upon us.  This man was not at all given to love of romance or superstition, yet the easy explanation that some man, for purpose of trick or crime, had hidden in the box, did not seem to him to fit the circumstances.  He could not make himself believe that the eyes he had seen belonged to a living man; on the other hand, he found it impossible to conceive of a tea-drinking ghost.

About a quarter of a mile away there was a long grove of birch trees, the projecting spur of a second growth of forest that covered the distant rising ground.  Towards this Trenholme strode, for it was the only covert near in which a human being could travel unseen.  It was more by the impulse of energy, however, than by reasonable hope that he came there, for by the time he had reached the edge of the trees, it was beginning to grow dark, even in the open plain.