“The thought and belief its former occupants—­have left behind.  For there has been coincidence here, a coincidence that must be rare.  The site on which this modern house now stands was Roman, before that Early Britain, with burial mounds, before that again, Druid—­the Druid stones still lie in that copse below the field, the Tumuli among the ilexes behind the drive.  The older building Sam Franklyn altered and practically pulled down was a monastery; he changed the chapel into a meeting hall, which is now the music room; but, before he came here, the house was occupied by Manetti, a violent Catholic without tolerance or vision; and in the interval between these two, Julius Weinbaum had it, Hebrew of most rigid orthodox type imaginable—­so they all have left their—­”

“Even so,” I repeated, yet interested to hear the rest, “what of it?”

“Simply this,” said Frances with conviction, “that each in turn has left his layer of concentrated thinking and belief behind him; because each believed intensely, absolutely, beyond the least weakening of any doubt —­the kind of strong belief and thinking that is rare anywhere today, the kind that wills, impregnates objects, saturates the atmosphere, haunts, in a word.  And each, believing he was utterly and finally right, damned with equally positive conviction the rest of the world.  One and all preached that implicitly if not explicitly.  It’s the root of every creed.  Last of the bigoted, grim series came Samuel Franklyn.”

I listened in amazement that increased as she went on.  Up to this point her explanation was so admirable.  It was, indeed, a pretty study in psychology if it were true.

“Then why does nothing ever happen?” I enquired mildly.  “A place so thickly haunted ought to produce a crop of no ordinary results!”

“There lies the proof,” she went on in a lowered voice, “the proof of the horror and the ugly reality.  The thought and belief of each occupant in turn kept all the others under.  They gave no sign of life at the time.  But the results of thinking never die.  They crop out again the moment there’s an opening.  And, with the return of Mabel in her negative state, believing nothing positive herself the place for the first time found itself free to reproduce its buried stores.

“Damnation, hell-fire, and the rest—­the most permanent and vital thought of all those creeds, since it was applied to the majority of the world—­broke loose again, for there was no restraint to hold it back.  Each sought to obtain its former supremacy.  None conquered.  There results a pandemonium of hate and fear, of striving to escape, of agonized, bitter warring to find safety, peace—­salvation.  The place is saturated by that appalling stream of thinking—­the terror of the damned.  It concentrated upon Mabel, whose negative attitude furnished the channel of deliverance.  You and I, according to our sympathy with her, were similarly involved.  Nothing happened, because no one layer could ever gain the supremacy.”