“True, Neville, all true!” he exclaimed. In a fresh bout of agitation, he leapt from his chair, paced to the centre of the room. He stood there beneath the tapestry of Susanna, whose time-faded flesh the firelight made to seem roseate and alive under the leering gaze of the elders. Quentin’s pale, tormented features were also scored by flame and shadow, also given a tortuous life of their own as he lifted a shaking hand to point at the window. “I’ve seen her, I tell you. Out there. By the abbey. And what’s more …” But his arm dropped to his side and he shook his head.

“What’s more?” I prompted.

“Oh!” It was a sound of such hopelessness that all my impatient scepticism was swept away by a tide of compassion. “I knew you would not believe me, Neville. You with your Science and your Reason—your new religion so eager to replace the old. But I tell you, I have seen her and what’s more … what’s more, I have heard her.” He turned such a sidelong, knowing look then at the chamber’s oaken door that, for the first time, I began to suspect he was truly mad. “In the house,” he muttered. “She has been in this house.”

Shaken—by his expression, by his tone—I tried once more to strike a hearty note of unconcern. “Well, then! It hardly matters whether I believe you or not. If she will appear to you, I hope she will not scruple to appear to me as well. Then I shall have ‘the sensible and true avouch of my own eyes,’ and I have no doubt,” I added in an undertone, “that we can begin to get to the bottom of this whole affair.”

Quentin, nodding, only turned and walked heavily back to the blazing hearth. “Be careful what you say, Neville,” he remarked. Then he sagged once more into his chair.

“I am not afraid,” I told him.

But that was a lie. I was very much afraid, though not for the reasons he might have imagined. It was my friend’s sanity I feared for. Whatever vision had appeared to him, it was clear to my physician’s understanding that it was no “extravagant and erring spirit,” but rather the product of his disordered faculties. What I could not yet discern was whether those faculties were still within reach of treatment or whether Quentin was—and I have seen such cases—spiralling irretrievably into lunacy. I expected—not to say dreaded—that that very night would tell me all.

So we kept vigil, he and I. The fire waned and the oil in the lamp burned away. The shadows wafted slowly down from the rafters and came to enshroud us. The figures on the tapestries blended with the darkness until only a glancing eye, an enigmatic smile, a grasping hand flared into view from time to time with the cracking of an ember.