through the door. . . . Or did I? I don't think I'm quite well."
He hung up his hat and umbrella, and walked into the sitting room. His wife was perched on the arm of his Morris chair, and her back was turned towards him. She was in dressing gown and slippers, and her hair was down. She was whispering in a very low voice: "My dear; my darling! I hope you haven't worked too hard to-day. You must take care of your health for my sake. Poor Richard went off in three days with double pneumonia.
Hazlitt stared. The woman on the chair was obviously not addressing him, and he thought for an instant that he had strayed into the wrong apartment and mistaken a stranger for his wife. But the familiar lines of her profile soon undeceived him, and he gasped. Then in a blinding flash he saw it all. His wife had betrayed him, and she was speaking to another man.
A woman passed
through him. "Hor-
rible!" he groaned.
"There isn't any-
thing to me
at all! I'm
worse than a
jelly fish!"
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Hazlitt quickly made up his mind that he would kill his wife. He advanced ominously to where she sat, and stared at her with furious, bloodshot eyes. She shivered and glanced about her nervously. The stranger in the chair rose and stood with his back to the fireplace. Hazlitt saw that he was tall and lean, and handsome. He seemed happy, and was smiling.
Hazlitt clenched his fist and glared fiercely at this intruder into his private home.
"Something has come between us," said Hazlitt's wife in a curiously distant voice. "I feel it like a physical presence. You will perhaps think me very silly."
The stranger shook his head. "I feel it too," he said. "It's as if the ghost of an old love had come back to you. While you were sitting on the chair I saw a change come over your face. I think you fear something."
"I'll make you both fear something!" shouted Hazlitt. He struck his wife on the face with his open hand. She colored slightly and continued to address the stranger. "It's as if he had come back. It is six months to-night since we buried him. He was a good husband and I am not sure that I have reverenced his memory. Perhaps we were too hasty, Jack!"
Hazlitt suppressed an absurd desire to scream. The blood was pounding in his ears, and he gazed from his wife to the stranger with stark horror. His wife's voice sent a flood of dreadful memories welling through his consciousness.
He saw again the hospital ward where he had spent three days of terrible agony, gasping for breath and shrieking for water. A tall doctor with sallow bloodless cheeks bent wearily above him and injected something into his arm. Then unconsciousness, a blessed oblivion wiping out the world and all its disturbing sights and sounds.
Later he opened his eyes and caught his wife in the act of poisoning him. He saw her standing above him with a spoon, and a bottle in her hand, on which was a skull and crossbones. He endeavored to rise up, to cry out, but his voice failed him and he could not move his limbs. He saw that his wife was possessed of a devil and primitive horror fastened on his tired brain.
He made dreadful grimaces and squirmed about under the sheets, but his wife was relentless. She bent and forced the spoon between his teeth. "I don't love you," she laughed shrilly. "And you're better dead. I only hope you won't return to haunt me!"
Hazlitt choked and fainted. He did not regain consciousness but later he watched his body being prepared for burial, and amused himself by thinking that his wife would soon regret her vileness. "I shall show her what a ghost can do!" he reflected grimly. "I shall pay her for this! She won't love me when I'm through with her!"
There had followed days of confusion. Hazlitt forgot that he was only a ghost, and he had walked into his old office and deliberately insulted Mr. Upcher. But now that his wife stood before him memories came rushing back. (Continued on page 52)
