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There’s nothing like light for dispelling superstitious terrors. Pallinghurst Manor-house was fortunately supplied with electric light; for Mrs. Bouverie-Barton was nothing if not intensely modern. Long before Rudolph had finished dressing for dinner, he was smiling once more to himself at his foolish conduct. Never in his life before—at least, since he was twenty—had he done such a thing; and he knew why he’d done it now. It was a nervous breakdown. He had been overworking his brain in town with those elaborate calculations for his Fortnightly article on “The Present State of Chinese Finances”; and Sir Arthur Boyd, the famous specialist on diseases of the nervous system, had earned three honest guineas cheap by recommending him “a week or two’s rest and change in the country.” That was why he had accepted Mrs. Bouverie-Barton’s invitation to form part of her brilliant autumn party at Pallinghurst Manor; and that was also doubtless why he had been so absurdly frightened at nothing at all just now on the common. Memorandum: Never to overwork his brain in future; it doesn’t pay. And yet, in these days, how earn bread and cheese at literature without overworking it?

He went down to dinner, however, in very good spirits. His hostess was kind; she permitted him to take in that pretty American. Conversation with the soup turned at once on the sunset. Conversation with the soup is always on the lowest and most casual plane; it improves with the fish, and reaches its culmination with the sweets and the cheese; after which it declines again to the fruity level. “You were on the barrow about seven, Mr. Reeve,” Mrs. Bouverie-Barton observed severely, when he spoke of the after-glow. “You watched that sunset close. How fast you must have walked home! I was almost half afraid you were going to be late for dinner.”

Rudolph coloured up slightly; ’twas a girlish trick, unworthy of a journalist; but still he had it. “Oh dear, no, Mrs. Bouverie-Barton,” he answered gravely. “I may be foolish, but not, I hope, criminal. I know better than to do anything so weak and wicked as that at Pallinghurst Manor. I do walk rather fast, and the sunset—well, the sunset was just too lovely.”

“Elegant,” the pretty American interposed, in her language.

“It always is, this night every year,” little Joyce said quietly, with the air of one who retails a well-known scientific fact. “It’s the night, you know, when the light burns bright on the Old Long Barrow.”

Joyce was Mrs. Bouverie-Barton’s only child—a frail and pretty little creature, just twelve years old, very light and fairylike, but with a strange cowed look which, nevertheless, somehow curiously became her.

“What nonsense you talk, my child!” her mother exclaimed, darting a look at Joyce which made her relapse forthwith into instant silence. “I’m ashamed of her, Mr. Reeve; they pick up such nonsense as this from their nurses.” For Mrs. Bouverie-Barton was modern, and disbelieved in everything. ’Tis a simple creed; one clause concludes it.

But the child’s words, though lightly whispered, had caught the quick ear of Archie Cameron, the distinguished electrician. He made a spring upon them at once; for the merest suspicion of the supernatural was to Cameron irresistible. “What’s that, Joyce?” he cried, leaning forward across the table. “No, Mrs. Bouverie-Barton, I really must hear it. What day is this to-day, and what’s that you just said about the sunset and the light on the Old Long Barrow?”

Joyce glanced pleadingly at her mother, and then again at Cameron. A very faint nod gave her grudging leave to proceed with her tale, under maternal disapprobation; for Mrs. Bouverie-Barton didn’t carry her belief in Woman’s Rights quite so far as to apply them to the case of her own daughter. We must draw a line somewhere. Joyce hesitated and began. “Well, this is the night, you know,” she said, “when the sun turns, or stands still, or crosses the tropic, or goes back again, or something.”

Mrs. Bouverie-Barton gave a dry little cough. “The autumnal equinox,” she interposed severely, “at which, of course, the sun does nothing of the sort you suppose. We shall have to have your astronomy looked after, Joyce; such ignorance is exhaustive. But go on with your myth, please, and get it over quickly.”

“The autumnal equinox; that’s just it,” Joyce went on, unabashed. “I remember that’s the word, for old Rachel, the gipsy, told me so. Well, on this day every year, a sort of glow comes up on the moor; oh! I know it does, mother, for I’ve seen it myself; and the rhyme about it goes—

‘Every year on Michael’s night

Pallinghurst Barrow burneth bright.’

Only the gipsy told me it was Baal’s night before it was St. Michael’s; and it was somebody else’s night, whose name I forget, before it was Baal’s. And the somebody was a god to whom you must never sacrifice anything with iron, but always with flint or with a stone hatchet.”

Cameron leaned back in his chair and surveyed the child critically. “Now, this is interesting,” he said; “profoundly interesting. For here we get, what is always so much wanted, firsthand evidence. And you’re quite sure, Joyce, you’ve really seen it?”

“Oh! Mr. Cameron, how can you?” Mrs. Bouverie-Barton cried, quite pettishly; for even advanced ladies are still feminine enough at times to be distinctly pettish. “I take the greatest trouble to keep all such rubbish out of Joyce’s way; and then you men of science come down here and talk like this to her, and undo all the good I’ve taken months in doing.”

“Well, whether Joyce has ever seen it not,” Rudolph Reeve said gravely, “I can answer for it myself that I saw a very curious light on the Long Barrow to-night; and, furthermore, I felt a most peculiar sensation.”

“What was that?” Cameron asked, bending over towards him eagerly. For all the world knows that Cameron, though a disbeliever in most things (except the Brush light), still retains a quaint tinge of Highland Scotch belief in a good ghost story.

“Why, as I was sitting on the barrow,” Rudolph began, “just after sunset, I was dimly conscious of something stirring inside, not visible or audible, but——”

“Oh, I know, I know!” Joyce put in, leaning forward, with her eyes staring curiously; “a sort of a feeling that there was somebody somewhere, very faint and dim, though you couldn’t see or hear them; they tried to pull you down, clutching at you like this: and when you ran away, frightened, they seemed to follow you and jeer at you. Great gibbering creatures! Oh, I know what all that is! I’ve been there, and felt it.”

“Joyce!” Mrs. Bouverie-Barton put in, with a warning frown, “what nonsense you talk! You’re really too ridiculous. How can you suppose Mr. Reeve ran away—a man of science like him—from an imaginary terror?”

“Well, I won’t quite say I ran away,” Rudolph answered, somewhat sheepishly. “We never do admit these things, I suppose, after twenty. But I certainly did hurry home at the very top of my speed—not to be late for dinner, you know, Mrs. Bouverie-Barton; and I will admit, Joyce, between you and me only, I was conscious by the way of something very much like your grinning followers behind me.”

Mrs. Bouverie-Barton darted him another look of intense displeasure. “I think,” she said, in that chilly voice that has iced whole committees, “at a table like this, and with such thinkers around, we might surely find something rather better to discuss than such worn-out superstitions. Professor Spence, did you light upon any fresh palæoliths in the gravel-pit this morning?”