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Page:More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary.djvu/39

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THE ROSE GARDEN
31

—seemed to be, as he said, making something up against him. All the voices sounded to him very distant, but he remembered bits of the things that were said: ‘Where were you on the 19th of October?’ and ‘Is this your handwriting?’ and so on. I can see now, of course, that he was dreaming of some trial: but we were never allowed to see the papers, and it was odd that a boy of eight should have such a vivid idea of what went on in a court. All the time he felt, he said, the most intense anxiety and oppression and hopelessness (though I don't suppose he used such words as that to me). Then, after that, there was an interval in which he remembered being dreadfully restless and miserable, and then there came another sort of picture, when he was aware that he had come out of doors on a dark raw morning with a little snow about. It was in a street, or at any rate among houses, and he felt that there were numbers and numbers of people there too, and that he was taken up some creaking wooden steps and stood on a sort of platform, but the only thing he could