He followed her eyes, and to his amazement saw that his fingers were as white as usual, and quite free from the awful stain that had been there ten minutes before.  There was no sign of blood.  No amount of staring could bring it back.  Had he gone out of his mind?  Had his eyes and ears played such tricks with him?  Had his senses become false and perverted?  He dashed past the landlady, out into the passage, and gained his own room in a couple of strides.  Whew! . . . the partition no longer bulged.  The paper was not torn.  There was no creeping, crawling thing on the faded old carpet.

“It’s all over now,” drawled the metallic voice behind him.  “I’m going to bed again.”

He turned and saw the landlady slowly going downstairs again, still shading the candle with her hand and peering up at him from time to time as she moved.  A black, ugly, unwholesome object, he thought, as she disappeared into the darkness below, and the last flicker of her candle threw a queer-shaped shadow along the wall and over the ceiling.

Without hesitating a moment, Shorthouse threw himself into his clothes and went out of the house.  He preferred the storm to the horrors of that top floor, and he walked the streets till daylight.  In the evening he told the landlady he would leave next day, in spite of her assurances that nothing more would happen.

“It never comes back,” she said—­“that is, not after he’s killed.”

Shorthouse gasped.

“You gave me a lot for my money,” he growled.

“Waal, it aren’t my show,” she drawled.  “I’m no spirit medium.  You take chances.  Some’ll sleep right along and never hear nothin’.  Others, like yourself, are different and get the whole thing.”

“Who’s the old gentleman?—­does he hear it?” asked Jim.

“There’s no old gentleman at all,” she answered coolly.  “I just told you that to make you feel easy like in case you did hear anythin’.  You were all alone on the floor.”

“Say now,” she went on, after a pause in which Shorthouse could think of nothing to say but unpublishable things, “say now, do tell, did you feel sort of cold when the show was on, sort of tired and weak, I mean, as if you might be going to die?”

“How can I say?” he answered savagely; “what I felt God only knows.”

“Waal, but He won’t tell,” she drawled out.  “Only I was wonderin’ how you really did feel, because the man who had that room last was found one morning in bed—­”

“In bed?”

“He was dead.  He was the one before you.  Oh!  You don’t need to get rattled so.  You’re all right.  And it all really happened, they do say.  This house used to be a private residence some twenty-five years ago, and a German family of the name of Steinhardt lived here.  They had a big business in Wall Street, and stood ’way up in things.”

“Ah!” said her listener.

“Oh yes, they did, right at the top, till one fine day it all bust and the old man skipped with the boodle—­”