firm; with a cleverness worthy
a better story he left his hearer to guess, imagine, who the visitor
might be.

"Don't you think," Mrs. Falconer breathed, after a very short lapse
into silence, "that we might let such ghosts alone on Christmas Eve?"

She rose and stood before him in her soft, luminous dress; her eyes
were intent on him, but in reality she was not looking at him.

He had grown so detestable that she could bear his presence no longer;
she found herself, however, wanting to learn all his knowledge to its
finest detail. She found that she despised herself for any interest
she might take. She got rid of him at length, how, she never knew.
But she saw him leave her presence with relief.

When the miserable man, as she called him, had taken his leave, the
deserted guest looked about her rather defiantly, as if the objects
with which the room was filled were hostile. Then, with a half-audible
exclamation she sank down in a chair, her elbow on the left arm of it,
and her chin in her hand.

Well, the imputation, the character of what she had just heard vulgarly
said and to which, for a bewildered second, she had perhaps vulgarly
listened--was highly dreadful, highly disordering to her fashion of
thinking and believing about Jimmy Bulstrode! Oh, for a moment she had
half believed what that creature said, and her eyes had winked fast at
the game before them! In the swiftness of the revolutions it had
seemed for a sole flash real; but now that the noise had stopped and
the carousel as well, she saw how _wooden_ the horses were and that
they were as dead as doornails! If she had been disturbed, she came
loyally back now, with a glow and a rush of tenderness as she instantly
re-instated what could never lose caste.

Oh, The Dials! She couldn't conceive what Jimmy had in reality,
rashly, delightfully done there; what he had planted or installed, if
he had planted or installed anything. But whatever the truth was, it
was sure to be essentially right, as far as ethics went--she knew that
at least. But Jimmy's delicacy and his heart were all too fine for the
crude wisdom of the world or for her common-sense, which would have
told him no doubt, had he cared to ask, that he was rash and wild.

She was prepared to hear that he had made some Magdalen a home in this
prudish country place. At this possibility Jimmy's kindness and
charity stood out graciously in strong contrast to the prudish judgment.

There