Edgar Jepson

“ The footsteps came back down the hall and began to mount the stairs, slowly. An odd fancy seized me that there was something wrong about them, something sinister in their muffled fall.
Without thinking, I kept pace with them up my own stairs. I had come to the top of the first flight, with my uneasiness growing, when on a sudden I filled with the sense, the certainty rather, that something was very wrong indeed—appallingly wrong. ”

“ They were too heavy to be Woodfell's. They must be the footsteps of the rich man; and I thought to myself that he must have a great deal more pluck than I had given him credit for, to be out in that garden at night. Also I thought that, judging from the heaviness of his tread, he must weigh nearly eighteen stone.
I put away the biscuit tin, switched off the light, and came out into the hall. Through the wall there came, muffled, the sound of the heavy footsteps in the hall of No. 19.
"Why, the man does weigh eighteen stone." ”

“ Work is so good for women; it keeps them, even more than it keeps men, out of mischief.
It had never occurred to me that so much work as this attached to the office of a celebrant of one of the rites; but after what she had said it grew plain enough that there must be. Each of them would not only have to learn, in a strange tongue, the actual rite which he celebrated; but he would have to be able to follow roughly the general invocation and make his responses in the other rites also in strange tongues. ”