A hand was laid upon my shoulder as I stood upon the platform of the little country depot, waiting for the train. I turned and found myself face to face with Mark Graham. Something in his countenance startled me.

      "Why, Mark, old fellow, how are you?" I said, shaking hands with him. "I didn't expect to see you here. What's happened to you since I saw you last? You look as if you had seen a ghost"

      "Do I?" he said, with a ghastly kind of a smile, and I fancied his voice had changed as much as his looks. He was usually one of the jolliest fellows to be found anywhere.

      "Yes, you do," I answered. "What's the trouble? The train isn't due for half an hour yet. Let's go somewhere and sit down, and you can tell me all about it; that is if there's anything to tell."

      We went across the track to where some stunted pines grew, and found a seat under them quite free from all intrusion.

      "So you think I look as if I had seen a ghost, eh?" said Mark. "Well, I haven't but I feel about the same as if I had. You know I was at Melrose when that terrible affair happened, I suppose."

      "What terrible affair?" I asked. "I have just come from the North Woods, and haven't had a letter or seen a paper for a month."

      "Then you didn't know that Alice Leith was dead?"

      I turned a shocked and startled face upon my friend.

      "That doesn't seem possible, Mark. I left her two months ago the picture of perfect health. When did she die?"

      "About two weeks ago. She died very suddenly. For the last two weeks, — ever since the night after her death, in fact, — we have been hunting for her body."

      "My God, Mark, what do you mean?" I cried, startled by his words and look. "Was — was she drowned?"

      "No, she died at home, but" — and here my friend's voice was low, as if he hardly liked to speak the strange truth aloud — "her body was stolen the night after her death, and we have been searching for it ever since, and have found not a single trace of it."

      I think my face must have told Mark how horrified I was, for he gave a nervous little laugh and said:

      "It's your turn to look as if you had seen a ghost. But I suppose you'd like to hear the particulars of this most mysterious affair, and I will give them briefly. Miss Leith was taken suddenly ill, and died on the second day. Several of us were visiting at Melrose, and her illness was so brief that none of us had gone away when it ended in death. Being there at the time it happened, we of course were expected to stay until after the funeral. On the night after she died there were four of us 'watching with the dead,' as they say in the country. Her body was in the library, and we occupied a small parlor opening off it. Once in half an hour we went in to wet the cloth that covered her face, and see that everything was as it should be. It was a very wild and stormy night and the rain fell in torrents. The wind blew so that nothing could be heard save the dash of the rain against the house, and the hours as we sat there next to the room in which lay the always awful mystery of death, seemed as long as days ought to. As the clock was striking midnight, we went in for the last time to wet the face-cloths. When we crossed the threshold of the room at half past twelve, it was empty. From that time to this no trace has been found of the body of Alice Leith."

      I could not speak, my friend's story horrified me so I half believed he was trying to impose on my credulity.

      "We roused the household and began a fruitless search. In the soft earth, under one of the library windows, we found what seemed to be a track, but the rain had almost washed it out, and it gave us no clue. If there had been other tracks on the paths, or in the highway, either of man, horse, or vehicle, the heavy rain had entirely obliterated them. The window was open, and we could be sure of but one thing, and that was that the body had been taken, through it. Where, or by whom, we knew then, and know now, no more than you do. We searched the grounds. We roused the neighbors and all the remainder of that terrible night we wandered hither and thither, seeking a clue but finding none. No one had heard anything like the sound of passing wheels. In the storm they could have come and gone, and made no sound above that of the wind and rain. When morning came we began the search again. Her father summoned aid from the city, and the matter was put in the hands of expert men who are skillful in unraveling mysteries. But, as I have said, not a single clue has been found. It is the most mysterious and horrible affair I ever had anything to do with. What motive one could have in stealing the body, who could have stolen it, and where it was taken to — these are the questions that have perplexed us, and they seem unanswerable by any information we can hope to obtain. The excitement has been intense. I have been wandering about, hoping to find some thread that would lead to a solution of the mystery, and trying to shake off by a change of scene the nightmare horror of the affair. But it clings to me and haunts me. I don't wonder that you thought I looked as if I had seen a ghost. I seem to live in a world full of them."

      "It is one of the most awfully mysterious occurrences I have ever heard of," I said, as I thought over what he had told me. "It hardly seems possible that such a thing could happen here and among people who occupy the position the Leiths do."

      The whistle of the coming train sounded sharply down the track, and we rose and went back to the depot.

      "Where are you going now?" I asked.

      "I don't know," he answered. "I would go back to work if I could shake off the incubus that is on me, but I can't do that. I hope to get over this haunted feeling by and by. You can't understand how it has affected every one of us who were there at the time. We seem to be searching for something in another world than the one we used to live in. Good-bye, old fellow, take care of yourself," and Mark Graham wrung my hand, and so we parted.
 

II.

      In the first flush of spring I was near Melrose, where the mysterious affair of which my friend Graham had told me occurred. I had long been a friend of the Leiths, and I concluded to call on them. Living under a shadow which had never been lifted, and through which no light had ever penetrated, they would be glad to see me, I felt sure.

      And they were. I was grieved, but not very much surprised, to see the change a year had wrought in them. They looked old and broken in health when they should have been in the prime of life's early fall.

      "You have never heard anything that threw light on the mystery?" I asked, as Mr. Leith and I sat on the veranda.

      "Not a word," he answered "The mystery is the same to-day as it was at first."

      Just then I heard a slow, languid step in the hall, and presently a man with the most unearthly face I ever saw came out and joined us. It was more like a shadowy outline of flesh and blood than like flesh and blood itself. Have you never held your hand before a candle in a dark place, and seen how transparent it seemed? It was so with this man's face. The soul, the spirit, or whatever it is that is the center and source of intelligence, seemed to shine through it.

      "My nephew, Max Cramer," Mr. Leith said, and wheeled an easy chair forward for him. "Max, as you see, is in feeble health, and I have urged him to come out and breathe the spring air."

      Max Cramer sat down and leaned his head wearily back against the crimson cloth of the chair. His face against such a background looked fragile as frost-work. The blue veins showed startlingly on his thin hands and almost fleshless temples. He might be of the earth, earthy, but I could not make it seem that he was flesh and blood, like myself.

      And such a sorrowful face as it was! It haunted me when I looked away, and some kind of strong fascination in it would draw my eyes back to it. Was that shadow in the far-seeing eyes one of regret, remorse, or repentance? It was one, or all, and he made me think of some fallen angel who pines for his lost estates, and is fading out of life because the consciousness of the sin by which he fell cannot be shaken off, and he is haunted night and day by the specter of dead hopes and dreams. It was a face that had once been fair to look upon. It had been a strangely powerful face in days gone by. A mind that had been intense in action had looked out through those dreary eyes which now seemed to see nothing but shadows unseen to others. I saw at a glance that before me was the wreck of a strong intellect.

      He sat there for perhaps an hour, never once looking at or speaking to me. Indeed, he did not seem to be conscious of my presence.

      By and by he rose and walked unsteadily toward the door. Mr. Leith sprang up to assist him, but he waved him back.

      "Do not come with me," he said, and though Mr. Leith insisted on being allowed to help him up the stairs, he resolutely refused all assistance.

      "Poor Max," the old man said, coming back and sitting down by me. "His life is in the same shadow that has fallen so darkly about myself and family. He was to have married Alice. He was away from home when she died. He came back on the day after her body was stolen. He has never been the same person since that he was before. He was always different from other people. He was educated at Heidelberg, and I think German metaphysics took too strong a hold of him for his own good. He came back to us a dreamer. Alice loved him, and studied with him, and took a deep interest in his strange fancies, but I never cared to trouble myself about them. He has a laboratory in the tower you see at the corner of the house, and no one ever sets foot in it save himself. Under it is his study and there he remains from morning till night, busy over his wild theories. I go there but seldom. The atmosphere seems too heavily charged with uncanny elements to be agreeable to me. What wonderful experiments he has tried in that workshop of his none of us know. If Alice had lived she might have won him from his unhealthy books and work, and made him more like the Max he used to be. But he is nearly done with it all now. Poor Max!"

      I was very much interested in this strange person. So much so that I hung about the house all next day, fearing that he might come down when I was away and I should fail to see him.

      About sunset he came down the stairs, slowly, weakly, often stopping to rest. I went to him and asked if I might not be allowed to help him.

      "If you please," he said. "I would like to walk about the garden a little, if you will let me lean upon your arm."

      His weight upon me was like that of a child. Our walk about the paths was so slow that it tired me.

      "I think this is for the last time," he said by and by, pausing beneath the windows of his tower and looking up to them as they gleamed like crimson fire in the light of the setting sun. "For the last time! Some would be glad of that because they had no fear of what was to come after, but I — am I glad? Am I afraid? Can what is to come be worse than what I suffer here? Somewhere in that book they call the Bible it says something about dying daily. I die daily." He repeated the words slowly, seeming all the time to be talking to himself, as if unmindful of my presence. "Have I not suffered the pangs of death? Have I not prayed to die and been refused my plea? But the end men call death is near — and after death, what?"

      Suddenly he seemed to recollect my presence.

      "I have something here I want you to read if — if anything happens to me," he said drawing a roll of manuscript from his pocket. "You are not going away for a day or two?"

      "I shall stay till the end of the week," I answered.

      "I feel that something will happen very soon, perhaps to-night," he said. "If I die, read this after the discovery of my death, but not before. Promise me this."

      I promised.

      "If I am alive when you go away, you can give it back to me. You will not believe it when you read it. You will think it the ravings of a madman, but it is true, all true."

      Presently he signified his desire to return to the house. He allowed me to assist him as far as the stairs. Farther than that he would not let me go.

      "When you know all, pity me, pity me," he said. "I have sinned, and for that sin I have paid a fearful penalty. Oh God! and the penalty goes on forever and forever."

      Then he turned away, and went slowly up the stairs. That was the last time I ever looked upon the living face of Max Cramer.

      We were sitting at the breakfast table next morning, when a servant came in saying that the door of Max's room was open, and he was lying on the floor. She had spoken to him, but he had not replied. Becoming frightened she had come to find Mr. Leith.

      We hurried to his room. Max Cramer had been dead for hours.

      He was lying at the foot of the stairs leading to the tower. It seemed as if he had been attempting their ascent when the springs of life had given out and he had fallen at the bottom of them to die.
 

III.

      In my room an hour later I sat down to read the manuscript he had given me.

      And this is what I read:

      "I am accursed. I have attempted the work of a God, and lost my soul!

      "I am dying slowly. Every day I feel myself growing weaker. Slowly, but surely, my life is being drained away, and soon the end will come. And then — oh God! — I dare not say my God — then —

      "Before I die I must make confession of my awful crime. I dare not die with it untold.

      "I loved my cousin Alice. To me, she was the one woman of the world. She was more to me than God or my soul. For love of her I have lost her, and my soul!

      "I went away from her leaving her in the flush of rosy beautiful health. I came back to find her dead. Dead! The woman I loved had left my world and gone away somewhere into the hereafter.

      "I came back on a night of storm and darkness. Coming near the house, I saw lights moving in the library, and looking through the half-closed shutters, I saw a long grim shape lying in the center of the room, about which some men and women stood. When they lifted the cloth that covered the face I saw that the woman who was lying there dead was my Alice.

      "Oh, the anguish of that awful moment! Had I lost her? In the land to which her feet had wandered would I ever find her again? Oh God, not my God! if I had left it all to Thee, I might have found her somewhere, sometime in the after world, but, not now, not now! For her soul, one world, and for mine another.

      "Standing there outside the window, a thought came to me like a lightning-flash. I remembered that once she had said to me that if she were dead, and I willed that she should come back to me from the other world, she believed she would come in answer to the call of soul to soul. Was she really lost to me, after all? Could I not call back soul and breath to this form of clay?

      "Instantly my mind was absorbed by that one idea. To think was to act. I climbed into the room through one of the windows, took the body in my arms, and bore it by an unused stairway leading from the rear of the library to my room, and through that to my tower-chamber, where I knew it would be safe.

      "I laid the body down in the solitude of that lonesome room. Then I lighted a lamp, and set it at her head trembling in strange excitement, yet feeling a strength I had never felt before. I almost felt myself a God in that awful moment. Ah, if I could have died then! God of heaven and earth, why didst thou not smite me with a shaft from thy strong bow of vengeance?

      "I knelt down beside her. I took both her hands in mine and held them fast. Then I called up all the energy of my will, and bent it upon the awful task I had undertaken. 'Alice,' I cried with the voice of my soul, 'come back.' I willed that life should start to action again in the form before me. My whole power was concentrated in that one idea. If earth had gone to wreck about me then I should not have known it.

      "'Come back, spirit called life,' I kept saying over and over. Time went by, and I heeded it not. I fancied that I felt a warmth stealing into the hands I held, and that I saw a faint color coming into the face I watched with such terrible intensity. A wild thrill of exultation leaped like fire through my veins. I would work a miracle no other man had ever wrought!

      "At last, at last! There came a flutter of the eyelids, and then they lifted, and the eyes of Alice looked into mine. I felt the breath coming and going over her lips, and then I fell forward in the gray light of dawn and lay beside her on the floor, weak as a little child. The tension was removed from my brain, and the reaction was almost like death. For hours I did not stir. But the wild triumph of a work accomplished beat back and forward in my brain like a tide. I had brought back life to the woman I loved. I had conquered death!

      "The sun was high in the heavens when I rallied strength enough to rouse myself from the lethargy that had fallen upon me. I raised myself to a sitting posture, and touched the hands I had held in mine so long. They were warm and moist, but there was no response to my clasp in them. The eyes were wide open, but they seemed staring into vacancy. There was color in the cheeks, but the face seemed to lack light, and the subtle play of mind on matter was not to be seen in the features of the Woman before me.

      "'Alice,' I cried, 'Alice, speak to me.' But there was not so much as a movement of lid or lip. A statue would have been no more unresponsive than was the form before me.

      "A wild fear began to creep over me, but I shook it off. The ordeal had been so terrible that I had no right to expect much at first. By and by she would rouse from the trance of soul and sense.

      "I went down to the rooms below and my friends supposed I had just come home. I was always unlike other men. They had become used to my strange ways. They knew what Alice and I had been to each other, and the fact of her death, and the mysterious loss of her body explained to them any strange conduct on my part.

      "I got away from them as soon as possible and went back to the room in which I had hidden my secret.

      "Alice lay there still in the attitude of death. I knelt down beside her and called her name. No answer.

      "I flung back the curtains with a swift, unutterable terror at heart. I came back and looked at the face lifted dumbly to mine. There was no look of intelligence in it. The eyes stared up at me with not a thought in them.

      "Then I knew what I had done. I had called back the breath of life, but the soul of Alice — that which was the Alice I loved — had not come back. I had triumphed over matter, but not mind. I had attempted the work of a God. I had dared to rebel against the fiat of fate. I had meddled with the mysteries of the infinite world, and here was my punishment. Before me lay a breathing form, but the principle of life only was in it. The soul had passed beyond my power.

      "Can you who read this understand the awful anguish of the moment when I realized what I had done? No. It would be useless for you to try to. The thought may be terrible to you, but you will fail to comprehend the intensity of my remorse. I prayed to die. A thousand fiends seemed laughing at and mocking me. 'You have dared to interfere with the will of God,' they cried. 'You have lost your soul, and the woman you loved. Oh, lost, lost, lost!'

      "Oh, my punishment! Day after day I crept to the motionless form and called it by the name it had used to bear. No answer ever came. It lay there, a human form, that breathed — a thing from which soul and sense had forever gone away — and nothing more. Nothing more! Oh, God, could anything be more terrible than the sight of it to me?

      "Days went by. I felt a strange weakness creeping over me. My vitality was leaving me.

      "Do you guess the truth? — that the life I had called back was a vampire one, living upon my vitality draining away from me daily my strength and my life? Such was the case. I have grown weaker and weaker slowly but surely, and some day the last drop of the vital element will be drained from me, and then the thing up stairs will turn to dust, at last, and I — God, God, God! have mercy upon me, and blot me utterly out of existence — let it be as if I had never been!

      "I have written this for someone to read when the end comes. The end, say I? The beginning, rather, of an eternity of remorse for my sin. I sought to baffle God. I dared to raise my voice against the decree of Omnipotence, and terrible has the punishment been. Pity me! I was mad. I knew not what I did. But I know now — I have lost Alice. I have lost my soul. Oh pity me! But I ask no one to pray for me. Prayers would avail nothing, for my punishment is just."

      The manuscript dropped from my trembling hands as I finished reading it. A strange terror took possession of me. I caught sight of my face in the glass as I went to the door. It was white as the face of the dead man up stairs.

      I went to Alice's father and put the strange narrative in his hands. Somehow I could not feel that it was not true, and yet, could such things be?

      When he had read it he rose up from his chair, but his limbs shook so that he could hardly stand. His face was pale as I felt my own to be.

      "It reads like a madman's fancies, but it impresses me with an awful sense of having been written by a man whose conscience forced him to tell the truth," he said. "Of course, though, he was insane and imagined these things," he added. "This story cannot be true. Experience, reason, everything is an argument against it. But" — with a sudden start — "he says he stole her body on the night of his return. We do not know what became of it. There may be some truth in this, at least. Shall we go up to his room in the tower, and see what evidence that has to give?"

      I bowed — I could not speak. The spell of an indescribable terror was upon me.

      We went up stairs, and through Max Cramer's room. I dared not look at the white shape that I knew was lying on the bed in the corner. We seemed to be in the chamber of an awful mystery, a mystery of the invisible world more than of this. It was not the idea of death that terrified us, but the strange and improbable story we had read had been powerful enough in its influence to make us feel, in a measure, as its writer must have felt. It had taken possession of our senses with its weird unreality.

      We paused in silent dread at the door of the tower-room. We felt as if we stood before the door of the other world. What lay beyond its threshold?

      A gust of wind came shrieking up the stairway as some door below was opened, and the door before us swung open as if by invisible hands. With frightened eyes we looked in. The room was in shadow, and at first we could but dimly discern anything in it. Gradually a shape in the center of the room seemed to emerge from the gloom as our eyes became accustomed to the dim light — a long, awfully suggestive shape lying on a low couch, and covered over with a white sheet. Beneath that drapery was distinctly outlined a human form.

      We never once looked at each other. The shape before us held our eyes captive. It drew them to it in awful fear and fascination.

      Suddenly my companion stepped forward, and, with shaking hands, lifted the cloth. Instead of the skeleton face we had expected to see we saw a face from which the blood seemed to have but recently receded in the ebb-tide of life. The body of Alice Leith was before us, seemingly but a few hours dead!

(THE END)