"Then the only thing is for you to go and ask before it gets a chance to answer," Bushwick said.

"Well, I will," the girl returned. And she swept round into the library, where she encountered the phantom with a little whoop as it started into sight before her. "I'm not going to be scared out of it!" she said, defiantly. "It's simply this: Did the person I suspect really take the ring."

The answer came, "Look on the floor under your dressing-table!"

"Well, if I find it there," the girl addressed the company, "I'm a spiritualist from this time forth." And she came back to her place, where she remained for some time explaining to those near how she had lately lost her ring and suspected her maid, whom she had dismissed.

Upon the whole, the effect was serious. The women, having once started, needed no more urging. One after another they confronted and questioned the oracle with increasing sincerity.

Miss Macroyd asked Verrian, "Hadn't you better take your chance and stop this flow of fatuity, Mr. Verrian?"

"I'm afraid I should be fatuous, too," he said. "But you?"

"Oh, thank you, I don't believe in ghosts, though this seems to be a very pretty one--very graceful, I mean. I suppose a graceful woman would be graceful even when a disembodied spirit. I should think she would be getting a little tried with all this questioning; but perhaps we're only reading the fatigue into her. The ghost may be merely overdone."

"It might easily be that," Verrian a.s.sented.

"Oh, may I ask it something now?" a girl's voice appealed to Bushwick.

It was the voice of that Miss Andrews who had spoken first, and first refused to question the ghost. She was the youngest of Mrs. Westangle's guests, and Verrian had liked her, with a sense of something precious in the prolongation of a child's unconsciousness into the consciousness of girlhood which he found in her. She was always likelier than not to say the thing she thought and felt, whether it was silly and absurd, or whether, as also happened, there was a touch of inspired significance in it, as there is apt to be in the talk of children. She was laughed at, but she was liked, and the freshness of her soul was pleasant to the girls who were putting on the world as hard as they could. She could be trusted to do and say the unexpected. But she was considered a little morbid, and certainly she had an exaltation of the nerves that was at times almost beyond her control.

"Oh, dear!" Miss Macroyd whispered. "What is that strange simpleton going to do, I wonder?"

Verrian did not feel obliged to answer a question not addressed to him, but he, too, wondered and doubted.

The girl, having got her courage together, fluttered with it from her place round to the ghost's in a haste that expressed a fear that it might escape her if she delayed to put it to the test. The phantom was already there, as if it had waited her in the curiosity that followed her. They were taking each other seriously, the girl and the ghost, and if the ghost had been a veridical phantom, in which she could have believed with her whole soul, the girl could not have entreated it more earnestly, more simply.

She bent forward, in her slim, tall figure, with her hands outstretched, and with her tender voice breaking at times in her entreaty. "Oh, I don't know how to begin," she said, quite as if she and the phantom were alone together, and she had forgotten its supernatural awfulness in a sense of its human quality. "But you will understand, won't you! You'll think it very strange, and it is very unlike the others; but if I'm going to be serious--"

The white figure stood motionless; but Verrian interpreted its quiet as a kindly intelligence, and the girl made a fresh start in a note a little more piteous than before. "It's about the--the truth. Do you think if sometimes we don't tell it exactly, but we wish we had very, very much, it will come round somehow the same as if we had told it?"

"I don't understand," the phantom answered. "Say it again--or differently."

"Can our repentance undo it, or make the falsehood over into the truth?"

"Never!" the ghost answered, with a pa.s.sion that thrilled to Verrian's heart.

"Oh, dear!" the girl said; and then, as if she had been going to continue, she stopped.

"You've still got your half-question, Miss Andrews," Bushwick interposed.

"Even if we didn't mean it to deceive harmfully?" the girl pursued.

"If it was just on impulse, something we couldn't seem to help, and we didn't see it in its true light at the time--"

The ghost made no answer. It stood motionless.

"It is offended," Bushwick said, without knowing the Shakespearian words. "You've asked it three times half a question, Miss Andrews.

Now, Mr. Verrian, it's your turn. You can ask it just one-quarter of a question. Miss Andrews has used up the rest of your share."

Verrian rose awkwardly and stood a long moment before his chair. Then he dropped back again, saying, dryly, "I don't think I want to ask it anything."

The phantom sank straight down as if sinking through the floor, but lay there like a white shawl trailed along the bottom of the dark curtain.

"And is that all?" Miss Macroyd asked Verrian. "I was just getting up my courage to go forward. But now, I suppose--"

"Oh, dear!" Miss Andrews called out. "Perhaps it's fainted. Hadn't we better--"

There were formless cries from the women, and the men made a crooked rush forward, in which Verrian did not join. He remained where he had risen, with Miss Macroyd beside him.

"Perhaps it's only a coup de theatre!" she said, with her laugh. "Better wait."

Bushwick was gathering the prostrate figure up. "She has fainted!" he called. "Get some water, somebody!"

XIX.

The early Monday morning train which brought Verrian up to town was so very early that he could sit down to breakfast with his mother only a little later than their usual hour.

She had called joyfully to him from her room, when she heard the rattling of his key as he let himself into the apartment, and, after an exchange of greetings, shouted back and forth before they saw each other, they could come at once to the history of his absence over their coffee. "You must have had a very good time, to stay so long. After you wrote that you would not be back Thursday, I expected it would be Sat.u.r.day till I got your telegram. But I'm glad you stayed. You certainly needed the rest."

"Yes, if those things are ever a rest." He looked down at his cup while he stirred the coffee in it, and she studied his att.i.tude, since she could not see his face fully, for the secret of any vital change that might have come upon him. It could be that in the interval since she had seen him he had seen the woman who was to take him from her. She was always preparing herself for that, knowing that it must come almost as certainly as death, and knowing that with all her preparation she should not be ready for it. "I've got rather a long story to tell you and rather a strange story," he said, lifting his head and looking round, but not so impersonally that his mother did not know well enough to say to the Swedish serving-woman:

"You needn't stay, Margit. I'll give Mr. Philip his breakfast. Well!"

she added, when they were alone.

"Well," he returned, with a smile that she knew he was forcing, "I have seen the girl that wrote that letter."

"Not Jerusha Brown?"

"Not Jerusha Brown, but the girl all the same."

"Now go on, Philip, and don't miss a single word!" she commanded him, with an imperious breathlessness. "You know I won't hurry you or interrupt you, but you must--you really must-tell me everything. Don't leave out the slightest detail."

"I won't," he said. But she was aware, from time to time, that she was keeping her word better than he was keeping his, in his account of meeting Miss Shirley and all the following events.

"You can imagine," he said, "what a sensation the swooning made, and the commotion that followed it."

"Yes, I can imagine that," she answered. But she was yet so faithful that she would not ask him to go on.

He continued, unasked, "I don't know just how, now, to account for its coming into my head that it was Miss Andrews who was my unknown correspondent. I suppose I've always unconsciously expected to meet that girl, and Miss Andrews's hypothetical case was psychologically so parallel--"

"Yes, yes!"

"And I've sometimes been afraid that I judged it too harshly--that it was a mere girlish freak without any sort of serious import."

"I was sometimes afraid so, Philip. But--"