"Look out!" Bobby warned.
The misshapen shadows danced with a multiple vivacity across the walls. Graham shaded the candle flame,
and the shadows became like morbid decorations, gargantuan and motionless.
"It's madness," Graham said. "There's no explanation of this that we can understand."
Howells's straight smile mocked them. As if in answer to Graham a voice sighed through the room. Its quality
was one with the shadows, unsubstantial and shapeless. Bobby grasped one of the bed posts and braced
himself, listening. The candle in Graham's hand commenced to flicker again, and Bobby knew that it hadn't
been his fancy, for Graham listened, too.
It shook again through the heavy, oppressive night, merely accentuated by the candle--a faint ululation barely
detaching itself from silence, straying after a time into the silence again. At first it was like the grief of a
woman heard at a great distance. But the sound, while it gained no strength, forced on them more and more an
abhorrent sense of intimacy. This crying from an infinite distance filled the room, seemed finally to have its
source in the room itself. After it had sobbed thinly into nothing, its pulsations continued to sigh in Bobby's
ears. They seemed timed to the renewed and eccentric dancing of the amorphous shadows.
Graham straightened and placed the candle on the bureau. He seemed more startled than he had been at the
unbelievable secretiveness of a dead man.
"You heard it?" Bobby breathed.
Graham nodded.
"What was it? Where did you think it came from?" Bobby demanded. "It was like someone mourning for
this--this poor devil."
Graham couldn't disguise his effort to elude the sombre spell of the room, to drive from his brain the illusion
of that unearthly moaning.
"It must have come from outside the house," he answered "There's no use giving way to fancies where there's
a possible explanation. It must have come from outside--from some woman in great agony of mind."
Bobby recalled his perception of a woman moving with a curious absence of sound about the edges of the
stagnant lake. He spoke of it to Graham.
"I couldn't be sure it was a woman, but there's no house within two miles. What would a woman be doing
wandering around the Cedars?"
"At any rate, there are three women in the house," Graham said, "Katherine and the two servants, Ella and
Jane. The maids are badly frightened. It may have come from the servants' quarters. It must have been one of
them."
But Bobby saw that Graham didn't believe either of the maids had released that poignant suffering.
"It didn't sound like a living voice," he said simply.
"Then how are we to take it?" Graham persisted angrily. "I shall question Katherine and the two maids."
He took up the candle with a stubborn effort to recapture his old forcefulness, but as they left the room the