Avon Fantasy Reader No. 8 — page 119: what you’re looking at

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

THE CANAL 115 soon have will make me forget the things I have not yet forgotten. The scream- ing, the reviling and cursing! Fear and flight! As you pass back by those houses, think how you would like to be shut in one of them, and in fear of your life. And then think of them no more; for | would forget them, and I will never speak of them again.” : I dared not answer her. I was surprised that she had vouchsafed me so much. But surely her words meant this: that before she had come to live on the decaying, water-rotted old boat, she had lived in one of those horrible houses I passed by on my way to her. Those houses, each of which locked like the predestined scene of a murder! As I left her that night, I felt that I was very daring. “One or two nights more and you will walk beside me,” I called to her. “I have watched the water at noon, and it hardly moves at all. I threw a scrap of paper into the canal, and it whirled and swung a little where a thin skim of oil lay on the water down there—oil from the big, dirty city you are well out of. But though I watched and watched, I could not see it move downward at all. Perhaps tomorrow night, or the night after, you will walk on the bank with me. I hope it will be clear and moonlight, and I will be near enough to see you clearly—as well as you seem always to see me in darkness or moonlight, equally well. And perhaps I will kiss you—but not unless you let me. And yet, the next day, for the first time my thoughts were definitely troubled. I had been living in a dream—I began to speculate concerning the end of the path on which my feet were set. I had conceived, from the first, such a horror of those old houses by the canal! They were well. enough to walk past, nursing gruesome thoughts for a midnight treat. But, much as I loved all that was weird and eery about the cirl | was wooing so strangely, it was a little too much for my fancy that she had come from them. : By this time, I had become decidedly unpopular in my place of business. Not that I had made enemies, but that my peculiar ways had caused too much adverse comment. It would have taken very little, I think, to have made the entire office force decide that I was mad. After the events of the next twenty- four hours, and after this letter is found and read, they will be sure that they knew it all along! At this time, however, they were punctiliously polite to me, and-merely let me alone as much as possible—which suited me perfect- ly. I dragged wearily through day after day, exhausted from lack of sleep, conscious of their speculative glances, living only for the night to come. But on this day, I approached the man who had invited me to the camp across the river, who had unknowingly shown me the way that led to my love. “Have you ever noticed the row of tumble-down houses along the canal on the city side?” I asked him. He gave me an odd look. I suppose he sensed the significance of my break-