" asked Donald, looking round in her
face with a bright smile.

"Not nonsense to keep imagining what nobody can see?"

"I can only imagine what I do not see."

"Nobody ever saw such creatures as you suppose in any garden! Then why
fancy the dead so uncomfortable, or so ill looked after, that they come
back to plague us!"

"Plainly they have never plagued you much!" rejoined Donal laughing.
"But how often have you gone up and down these walks at dead of night?"

"Never once," answered Miss Graeme, not without a spark of indignation.
"I never was so absurd!"

"Then there may be a whole night-world that you know nothing about. You
cannot tell that the place is not then thronged with ghosts: you have
never given them a chance of appearing to you. I don't say it is so,
for I know nothing, or at least little, about such things. I have had
no experience of the sort any more than you--and I have been out whole
nights on the mountains when I was a shepherd."

"Why then should you trouble your fancy about them?"

"Perhaps just for that reason."

"I do not understand you."

"I mean, because I can come into no communication with such a world as
may be about me, I therefore imagine it. If, as often as I walked
abroad at night, I met and held converse with the disembodied, I should
use my imagination little, but make many notes of facts. When what may
be makes no show, what more natural than to imagine about it? What is
the imagination here for?"

"I do not know. The less one has to do with it the better."

"Then the thing, whatever it be, should not be called a faculty, but a
weakness!"

"Yes."

"But the history of the world shows it could never have made progress
without suggestions upon which to ground experiments: whence may these
suggestions come if not from the weakness or impediment called the
imagination?"

Again there was silence. Miss Graeme began to doubt whether it was
possible to hold rational converse with a man who, the moment they
began upon anything, went straight aloft into some high-flying region
of which she knew and for which she cared nothing. But Donal's
unconscious desire was in reality to meet her upon some common plane of
thought. He always wanted to meet his fellow, and hence that abundance
of speech, which, however poetic the things he said, not a few called
prosiness.

"I should think," resumed Miss Graeme, "if you want to work your
imagination, you will find more scope for