“But, how is it possible?” he exclaimed, his voice still shaking.  “How can it be possible?  When I came in here I saw the building in the moonlight.  They opened the door.  I saw the figures and heard the voices and touched, yes touched their very hands, and saw their damned black faces, saw them far more plainly than I see you now.”  He was deeply bewildered.  The glamour was still upon his eyes with a degree of reality stronger than the reality even of normal life.  “Was I so utterly deluded?”

Then suddenly the words of the stranger, which he had only half heard or understood, returned to him.

“Haunted?” he asked, looking hard at him; “haunted, did you say?” He paused in the roadway and stared into the darkness where the building of the old school had first appeared to him.  But the stranger hurried him forward.

“We shall talk more safely farther on,” he said.  “I followed you from the inn the moment I realised where you had gone.  When I found you it was eleven o’clock—­”

“Eleven o’clock,” said Harris, remembering with a shudder.

“—­I saw you drop.  I watched over you till you recovered consciousness of your own accord, and now—­now I am here to guide you safely back to the inn.  I have broken the spell—­the glamour—­”

“I owe you a great deal, sir,” interrupted Harris again, beginning to understand something of the stranger’s kindness, “but I don’t understand it all.  I feel dazed and shaken.”  His teeth still chattered, and spells of violent shivering passed over him from head to foot.  He found that he was clinging to the other’s arm.  In this way they passed beyond the deserted and crumbling village and gained the high-road that led homewards through the forest.

“That school building has long been in ruins,” said the man at his side presently; “it was burnt down by order of the Elders of the community at least ten years ago.  The village has been uninhabited ever since.  But the simulacra of certain ghastly events that took place under that roof in past days still continue.  And the ‘shells’ of the chief participants still enact there the dreadful deeds that led to its final destruction, and to the desertion of the whole settlement.  They were devil-worshippers!”

Harris listened with beads of perspiration on his forehead that did not come alone from their leisurely pace through the cool night.  Although he had seen this man but once before in his life, and had never before exchanged so much as a word with him, he felt a degree of confidence and a subtle sense of safety and well-being in his presence that were the most healing influences he could possibly have wished after the experience he had been through.  For all that, he still felt as if he were walking in a dream, and though he heard every word that fell from his companion’s lips, it was only the next day that the full import of all he said became fully clear to him.  The presence of this quiet stranger, the man with the wonderful eyes which he felt now, rather than saw, applied a soothing anodyne to his shattered spirit that healed him through and through.  And this healing influence, distilled from the dark figure at his side, satisfied his first imperative need, so that he almost forgot to realise how strange and opportune it was that the man should be there at all.