ou be good
enough to give this to Madame the moment that she returns and say that
it is 'Urgent,' d'une importance extreme."

"Well," said Mrs. Potten to herself, as she walked through the court and
gained the street, "and I should think it _was_ a disaster for a quiet,
respectable Warden of an Oxford college to marry a person of the Scott
type."

As to Louise, when she had closed the front door on Mrs. Potten's
retreating figure, she gazed hard at the card in her hand. The writing
was as follows:--

"Dear Lena,

"Can Miss Scott come to see me this afternoon without fail? Very
kindly allow her to come early.

"M. P."

It did not contain anything more.

Now, Mrs. Potten really believed in ghosts, but she thought of them as
dreary, uninteresting intruders on the world's history. There was
Hamlet's father's ghost that spoke at such length, and there was the
spirit that made Abraham's hair stand on end as it passed before him,
and then there was the ghost of Samuel that appeared to Saul and
prophesied evil. But of all ghosts, the one that Mrs. Potten thought
most dismal, was the ghost of the man-servant who came out from a
mansion, full of light and music, one winter night on a Devon bye-road.
There he stood in the snow directing the lost travellers to the nearest
inn, and (this was what struck Mrs. Potten's soul to the core) the
half-crown (an actual precious piece of money) that was dropped into his
hand--fell through the palm--on to the snow--and so the travellers knew
that they had spoken to a spirit, and were leaving behind them a ghostly
house with ghostly lights and the merriment of the dead.

Mrs. Potten's mind worked in columns, and had she been calm and happy
she would have spent the time returning to Potten End in completing the
list of ghosts she was acquainted with; but she was excited and full of
tumultuous thoughts.

There was, indeed, in Mrs. Potten's soul the strife of various passions:
there was the desire to act in a high-handed, swift Potten manner, the
desire to pursue and flatten any one who invaded the Potten preserves.
There was the desire to put her heavy individual foot upon a specimen of
the modern female who betrays the honour and the interest of her own
class. There was also the general desire to show a fool that she was a
fool. There was also the desire to snub Belinda Scott; and lastly, but
not least, there was the d