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seeing it closed and nothing there, neither said a word to the other
about it at the time. Mrs. Hall passed her husband in the passage
and ran on first upstairs. Someone sneezed on the staircase. Hall,
following six steps behind, thought that he heard her sneeze. She,
going on first, was under the impression that Hall was sneezing.
She flung open the door and stood regarding the room. "Of all the
curious!" she said.
She heard a sniff close behind her head as it seemed, and turning,
was surprised to see Hall a dozen feet off on the topmost stair.
But in another moment he was beside her. She bent forward and put
her hand on the pillow and then under the clothes.
"
Cold," she said. "He's been up this hour or more."
As she did so, a most extraordinary thing happened. The bed-clothes
gathered themselves together, leapt up suddenly into a sort of peak,
and then jumped headlong over the bottom rail. It was exactly as if
a hand had clutched them in the centre and flung them aside.
Immediately after, the stranger's hat hopped off the bed-post,
described a whirling flight in the air through the better part of
a circle, and then dashed straight at Mrs. Hall's face. Then as
swiftly came the sponge from the washstand; and then the chair,
flinging the stranger's coat and trousers carelessly aside, and
laughing drily in a voice singularly like the stranger's, turned
itself up with its four legs at Mrs. Hall, seemed to take aim at her
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