CHAPTER XII.
IN WHICH UNCLE LORNE TROUBLES ME.
I was growing most uncomfortably like one of Mrs.
Anne Radcliff's heroes — a nervous jace of demigods. I
walked like a sentinel up and down my chamber, puffing
leisurely the solemn incense, and trying to think of the
Opera and my essay on " Paradise Lost," and other pleas-
ant subjects. But it would not do. Every now and then,
as I turned towards the door, I fancied I saw it softly close.
I can't say whether it was altogether fancy. I called
out once or twice sharply—"Come in!" "Who's
there?" "Who's that? " and so forth, without any sort
of effect except that unpleasant reaction upon the nerves
which follows the sound of one's own voice in a solitude
of this kind. The fact is I did not myself believe in that
stealthy motion of my door, and set it down to one of
those illusions which I have sometimes succeeded in ana-
lysing — a half-seen combination of objects which, rightly
placed in the due relations of perspective, have no mutual
connection whatever.
I had now got half-way in my second cheroot, and the
clock clanged "one." It was a very still night, and the
prolonged boom vibrated strangely in my excited ears and
brain. One o'clock was better, however, than twelve.
Although, by Jove! the bell was "beating one,'* as I re-
member, precisely as that king of ghosts, old Hamlet,
revisited the glimpses of the moon, upon the famous plat-
form of Elsinore.
I had pondered too long over the lore of this Satanic
family, and drunk very strong tea. I suppose. I could