“I came into this place twenty years ago when my elder brother died,” he continued, “but could not afford to live here then.  My sister, whom you met at dinner, kept house for him till the end, and during all these years, while I was seeing service abroad, she had an eye to the place—­for we never got a satisfactory tenant—­and saw that it was not allowed to go to ruin.  I myself took possession, however, only a year ago.

“My brother,” he went on, after a perceptible pause, “spent much of his time away, too.  He was a great traveller, and filled the house with stuff he brought home from all over the world.  The laundry—­a small detached building beyond the servants’ quarters—­he turned into a regular little museum.  The curios and things I have cleared away—­they collected dust and were always getting broken—­but the laundry-house you shall see tomorrow.”

Colonel Wragge spoke with such deliberation and with so many pauses that this beginning took him a long time.  But at this point he came to a full stop altogether.  Evidently there was something he wished to say that cost him considerable effort.  At length he looked up steadily into my companion’s face.

“May I ask you—­that is, if you won’t think it strange,” he said, and a sort of hush came over his voice and manner, “whether you have noticed anything at all unusual—­anything queer, since you came into the house?”

Dr. Silence answered without a moment’s hesitation.

“I have,” he said.  “There is a curious sensation of heat in the place.”

“Ah!” exclaimed the other, with a slight start.  “You have noticed it.  This unaccountable heat—­”

“But its cause, I gather, is not in the house itself—­but outside,” I was astonished to hear the doctor add.

Colonel Wragge rose from his chair and turned to unhook a framed map that hung upon the wall.  I got the impression that the movement was made with the deliberate purpose of concealing his face.

“Your diagnosis, I believe, is amazingly accurate,” he said after a moment, turning round with the map in his hands.  “Though, of course, I can have no idea how you should guess—­”

John Silence shrugged his shoulders expressively.  “Merely my impression,” he said.  “If you pay attention to impressions, and do not allow them to be confused by deductions of the intellect, you will often find them surprisingly, uncannily, accurate.”

Colonel Wragge resumed his seat and laid the map upon his knees.  His face was very thoughtful as he plunged abruptly again into his story.

“On coming into possession,” he said, looking us alternately in the face, “I found a crop of stories of the most extraordinary and impossible kind I had ever heard—­stories which at first I treated with amused indifference, but later was forced to regard seriously, if only to keep my servants.  These stories I thought I traced to the fact of my brother’s death—­and, in a way, I think so still.”