Lost Hearts by M R James

Lost Hearts by M R James
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There is a house in Lincolnshire where a scholar lives alone with his books and his learning and his carefully recorded dates. He is a kind man, by all appearances — generous to orphaned children, interested in the old religions, methodical in his habits. The kind of man that academics find reliable.

M. R. James wrote this story in 1895. His erudition encompassed the respectable and the less so, and he knew the darker currents of the archive as well as any man alive.

Something — or someone — has been waiting in that house. Waiting, with considerable patience, for the third.
"Lost Hearts" was first published in the Pall Mall Magazine in 1895, and collected in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, published by Edward Arnold in 1904.

*Montague Rhodes James (1862–1936) was a medieval manuscript scholar, Provost of King's College Cambridge and later of Eton, and the most influential writer of English ghost stories of the twentieth century.*