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The first thing which I did when the sun was up was to return to that place:  and I returned with hard and masterful brow.

Approaching Peters’ house I saw now, what the darkness had hidden from me, that on his balcony was someone—­quite alone there.  The balcony is a slight open-work wrought-iron structure, connected to a small roof by three slender voluted pillars, two at the ends, one in the middle:  and at the middle one I saw someone, a woman—­kneeling—­her arms clasped tight about the pillar, and her face rather upward-looking.  Never did I see aught more horrid:  there were the gracious curves of the woman’s bust and hips still well preserved in a clinging dress of red cloth, very faded now; and her reddish hair floated loose in a large flimsy cloud about her; but her face, in that exposed position, had been quite eaten away by the winds to a noseless skeleton, which grinned from ear to ear, with slightly-dropped under-jaw—­most horrid in contrast with the body, and frame of hair.  I meditated upon her a long time that morning from the opposite pavement.  An oval locket at her throat contained, I knew, my likeness:  for eight years previously I had given it her.  It was Clodagh, the poisoner.

I thought that I would go into that house, and walk through it from top to bottom, and sit in it, and spit in it, and stamp in it, in spite of any one:  for the sun was now high.  I accordingly went in again, and up the stairs to the spot where I had been frightened, and had heard the words.  And here a great rage took me, for I at once saw that I had been made the dupe of the malign wills that beset me, and the laughing-stock of Those for whom I care not a fig.  From a little mahogany table there I had knocked sideways to the ground, in my stumble, a small phonograph with a great 25-inch japanned-tin horn, which, the moment that I now noticed it, I took and flung with a great racket down the stairs:  for that this it was which had addressed me I did not doubt; it being indeed evident that its clock-work mechanism had been stopped by the volcanic scoriae in the midst of the delivery of a record, but had been started into a few fresh oscillations by the shock of the fall, making it utter those thirteen words, and stop.  I was sufficiently indignant at the moment, but have since been glad, for I was thereby put upon the notion of collecting a number of cylinders with records, and have been touched with indescribable sensations, sometimes thrilled, at hearing the silence of this Eternity broken by those singing and speaking voices, so life-like, yet most ghostly, of the old dead.

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