nable." Two or three of
Margaret's children were in the room, though not within hearing of us;
all looked bright and cheerful, nothing mysterious. Yet notwithstanding
the total deficiency of ghostly accessories, the story impressed me
vividly.

"It was early in the spring of '55 that it happened," began Lady
Farquhar; "I never forget the year, for a reason I will tell you
afterwards. It is fully fifteen years ago now--a long time--but I am
still quite able to recall the _feeling_ this strange adventure of mine
left on me, though a few details and particulars have grown confused
and misty. I think it often happens so when one tries, as it were _too_
hard, to be accurate and unexaggerated in telling over anything. One's
very honesty is against one. I have not told it over many times, but
each time it seems more difficult to tell it quite exactly; the
impression left at the time was so powerful that I have always dreaded
incorrectness or exaggeration creeping in. It reminds me, too, of the
curious way in which a familiar word or name grows distorted, and then
cloudy and strange, if one looks at it too long or thinks about it too
much. But I must get on with my story. Well, to begin again. In the
winter of '54-'55 we were living--my mother, my sisters, and I, that is,
and from time to time my brother--in, or rather near, a quiet little
village on the south coast of Ireland. We had gone there, before the
worst of the winter began at home, for the sake of my health. I had not
been as well as usual for some time (this was greatly owing, I believe,
to my having lately endured unusual anxiety of mind), and my dear mother
dreaded the cold weather for me, and determined to avoid it. I say that
I had had unusual anxiety to bear, still it was not of a kind to render
me morbid or fanciful. And what is even more to the point, my mind was
perfectly free from prepossession or association in connection with the
place we were living in, or the people who had lived there before us. I
simply knew nothing whatever of these people, and I had no sort of fancy
about the house--that it was haunted, or anything of that kind; and
indeed I never heard that it _was_ thought to be haunted. It did not
look like it; it was just a moderate-sized, somewhat old-fashioned
country, or rather sea-side, house, furnished, with the exception of one
room, in an ordinary enough modern style. The exception was a small room
on the bedroom floor, which, though not l