J. M. Barrie

“ It had been a horrible, inhuman scream, so loud and shrill as to tear a way through all the walls of the castle; a scream not of pain, but of triumph. I think it must have lasted half a minute, and then came silence, but still no one moved; we waited as if after lightning for the thunder.
The first person I saw was the earl. His face was not white, but gray. His teeth were fixed and he was staring at the door, waiting for it to open. Some men hastened to the door, and he cast out his arms and drove them back. But he never looked at them. The heir I saw with his hands over his face. ”

“ After the dancing begins, no man is ever a prominent figure in a room to those who are there merely to look on, as I was; and I now remember, as the two which my eyes followed with greatest pleasure, our hostess, a woman of winning manners, yet cold when need be, and the lady who was shortly to become her daughter, a languid girl, pretty to look at when her lover, the heir, was by her side. I know that nearly all present that night speak now of a haggard look on the earl's face, and of quick glances between him and his wife ”

“ I am not sufficiently old-fashioned for such a story, and rather believe that the Thing was never in the castle until the coming home from Africa of him who was known as the Left-Handed Earl, which happened a matter of seventy years ago. The secret manner of his coming and the oddness of his attendants, with a wild story of his clearing the house of all other servants for fifteen days, during which he was not idle, raised a crop of scandal that has not yet been cut level with the earth. ”