The Argosy — page 45: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE PHANTOM ARMY. gant well for all the dignity and grace of womanhood. In this I was wrong, as you shall see ; but I did not know that I was wrong until many days had passed and I had seen strange cities and strange men. “Let me implore you to return to your house,’’ I continued, while she stood shivering and watching me with curious eyes; ‘‘if I can be of any service there, do not hesitate to ask me. My name is Noel Falconer, and I was an officer of the Tenth Hussars three months ago. You are a stranger, I see, but you will find my arm stronger than my French if you have need of it.’’ Not until this moment, I am sure, did she awake to the fact that she stood in the street without cloak or hat, and that a stranger talked with her. But now, swiftly, my words recalled her to the truth, and she turned to me imploringly. ‘‘ Monsieur,’’ she said in a low and gentle voice, ‘‘a very great crime has been committed in that house tonight. I have no right to ask you, but will you goin with me? There is one dead there and I cannot go alone.’’ I stepped back a pace and looked at her. For an instant I thought that she was jesting with me, but the heaving bosom, the tears still upon her cheek, the quivering mouth gave the lie to such a thought. Madam,’’ I exclaimed, ‘‘ you may count upon me in all things. JI am ready to come with you now. Perhaps you would not wish others to know of this? ”’ . ‘Yes, yes,’’ she exclaimed, a spasm as of fear passing over her troubled face, ‘‘I do not wish that. They must know nothing; you will not tell them—you are a gentleman and will not speak of these things.” I protested that her secret should be well kept and was reiterating the promise when a footstep echoing in the distance cut short my words. She heard it too and taking my hand timidly and with the air of one who feared to go alone, she drew me into the hall of the house and closed the door softly behind us. I have been in many a situation of peril in my adventurous life; but never, I think, did such a sense of hidden danger take possession of me as at that moment when the street door of the unknown woman’s house closed upon us, and we were face to face God knew with what tragedy or terrible deed of the night. The silence, the hour, the suggestion of some dreadful mystery, the strange manner of the woman’s appearance in the street, the words I had heard from her lips and had regarded until this time as the ravings of hysteria—all these were at war with nerves shaken by long mouths of misfortune and of trouble. I shuddered to remember that she had spoken of a dead man being in the house. An overwrought and weary brain so played with me that if a hand had been stretched out from the dark- ness of the hall to touch me, I believe I had cried out as a child in the terror of a dream. These things I recall now with some little shame. Courage is much a matter of circumstance, and circumstance has been so strange a friend to me that I disguise nothing of my first meeting with one who changed the course of my life at an hour when life seemed to have no other gift forme. And it was odd, I vow, that within ten minutes of my first meeting with Isabella Eomichook (S@)