The Argosy — page 282: what you’re looking at

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

Mrs. Raven’s Temptation. 261 believed I knew what it was, and what it was doing. Other people saw that something too, but they could not understand any signifi- cance in it, and were only mystified. I heard so many explanations offered of what they had seen, that I scarcely knew what to think.” “Did you tell your part of the story?” asked the doctor, inter- ested. “No,” she said, with the ghost of a smile. ‘I kept that to myself.” ‘That reticence inclines me to think you were not mistaken.” “But don’t you think that some great anxiety or terror might make such reticence possible even to a diseased mind?” asked Mrs. Raven. The doctor was nonplussed. He had thought he should certainly please the lady by pronouncing in favour of her intellectual soundness. But now he felt that somehow she would have been better pleased if he had doubted it. What was one to do with such a woman? “Well,” said Mrs. Raven, with that strange smile still lingering on her face. ‘I feel quite certain that Leonard has inherited this terrible disease through me. You won’t forget what I have told you, doctor?” “Oh no,” answered Dr. Wragge: and he thought that if Mrs. Raven had wanted to commit a crime and to set up a plea of not guilty on the ground of insanity, she could not have laid her plan better. | And then the weary days woreon. ‘The time came when Leonard, of his own accord, recalled and spoke of the events immediately pre- ceding his accident. His story was, that he had certainly seen a man and a woman coming along Ash Lane to meet him. He entirely refused to admit that he had been particularly excited or alarmed. He had hadtime to notice the white cap and the green gown which village rumour had always attributed to the female’s appearance. Then he had felt a sudden strange sensation, and had heard a cry, which he could scarcely believe had been his own utterance. He remembered no more. This entirely agreed with the docior’s conviction as to the history of his malady. But at first, Leonard refused to believe the doctor’s explanation, that the two people in the lane were nothing but the phantasmagoria of his own brain creating, in the on-coming of disease, those images towards which his expectation had been directed. Not that Leonard thought they were ghosts—oh no, the man was sure to be some disreputable stranger ; the woman, not unlikely, one of their own servants, giving ear to his blandishments. On this suggestion, Frank interviewed Mrs. Sims, who again indig- nantly repelled it. Every female servant about the Court had been indoors on that evening. “Miss Agate can tell you they were all sitting together at needle- COMMICHOOKS. CO