"The Open Window"
Framton Nuttel, a nervous man, has come to stay in the country for his health. His sister, who thinks he should socialise while he is there, has given him letters of introduction to families in the neighbourhood who she got to know when she was staying there a few years previously.
Framton goes to visit a Mrs Sappleton, and while he is waiting for her to come down, he is entertained by her fifteen-year-old niece. The niece tells him that the French window is kept open, even though it is October, because her aunt's husband and her brothers were killed in a shooting accident three years ago, and Mrs Sappleton believes they will come back one day.
When Mrs Sappleton comes down she talks about her husband and brothers, and how they are going to come back from the shooting soon, and Framton, believing she is deranged, tries to distract her by talking about his health. Then, to his horror, Mrs Sappleton points out that her husband and brothers are coming, and he sees them walking towards the window, with their dog. He thinks he is seeing ghosts, and runs away.
Mrs Sappleton can't understand why he has run away, and when her husband and brothers come in, she tells them about the odd man who has just left. The niece explains that Framton Nuttel ran away because of the spaniel, he is afraid of dogs since being hunted by a pack of pariah dogs in India.
Hector Hugh Munro (18 December 1870 – 13 November 1916), better known by the pen name Saki, and also frequently as H. H. Munro, was a British writer whose witty, mischievous and sometimes macabre stories satirized Edwardian society and culture. He is considered a master of the short story and often compared to O. Henry and Dorothy Parker. Influenced by Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll, and Kipling, he himself influenced A. A. Milne, Noël Coward, and P. G. Wodehouse.[1]
Beside his short stories (which were first published in newspapers, as was customary at the time, and then collected into several volumes), he wrote a full-length play, The Watched Pot, in collaboration with Charles Maude; two one-act plays; a historical study, The Rise of the Russian Empire, the only book published under his own name; a short novel, The Unbearable Bassington; the episodic The Westminster Alice (a Parliamentary parody of Alice in Wonderland), and When William Came, subtitled A Story of London Under the Hohenzollerns, a fantasy about a future German invasion of Britain.