s; yet, by contrast with the higher order of
beauty I had just momentarily been in touch with, she seemed almost
ugly. How dull her eyes, how thin her voice, how vapid her smile, and
insipid her whole presentment.

For a moment she stood between me and the occupant of the window seat
while I counted out the small change for my meal and for her services;
but when, an instant later, she moved aside, I saw that the settle was
empty and that there was no longer anyone in the room but our two
selves.

This discovery was no shock to me; indeed, I had almost expected it, and
the man had gone just as a figure goes out of a dream, causing no
surprise and leaving me as part and parcel of the same dream without
breaking of continuity. But, as soon as I had paid my bill and thus
resumed in very practical fashion the thread of my normal consciousness,
I turned to the girl and asked her if she knew the old man who had been
sitting in the window seat, and what he had meant by the Wood of the
Dead.

The maiden started visibly, glancing quickly round the empty room, but
answering simply that she had seen no one. I described him in great
detail, and then, as the description grew clearer, she turned a little
pale under her pretty sunborn and said very gravely that it must have
been the ghost.

"Ghost! What ghost?"

"Oh, the village ghost," she said quietly, coming closer to my chair
with a little nervous movement of genuine alarm, and adding in a lower
voice, "He comes before a death, they say!"

It was not difficult to induce the girl to talk, and the story she told
me, shorn of the superstition that had obviously gathered with the years
round the memory of a strangely picturesque figure, was an interesting
and peculiar one.

The inn, she said, was originally a farmhouse, occupied by a yeoman
farmer, evidently of a superior, if rather eccentric, character, who had
been very poor until he reached old age, when a son died suddenly in
the Colonies and left him an unexpected amount of money, almost a
fortune.

The old man thereupon altered no whit his simple manner of living, but
devoted his income entirely to the improvement of the village and to the
assistance of its inhabitants; he did this quite regardless of his
personal likes and dislikes, as if one and all were absolutely alike to
him, objects of a genuine and impersonal benevolence. People had always
been a little afraid of the man, not understanding his eccentricities,
b