grown
robuster, ruddier, and fresher-eyed. It was only within a week that she
had felt in him the undefinable change that made her restless in his
absence, and as tongue-tied in his presence as though it were SHE who
had a secret to keep from him!

The thought that there WAS a secret somewhere between them struck her
with a sudden smart rap of wonder, and she looked about her down the
dim, long room.

"Can it be the house?" she mused.

The room itself might have been full of secrets. They seemed to be
piling themselves up, as evening fell, like the layers and layers of
velvet shadow dropping from the low ceiling, the dusky walls of books,
the smoke-blurred sculpture of the hooded hearth.

"Why, of course--the house is haunted!" she reflected.

The ghost--Alida's imperceptible ghost--after figuring largely in the
banter of their first month or two at Lyng, had been gradually discarded
as too ineffectual for imaginative use. Mary had, indeed, as became the
tenant of a haunted house, made the customary inquiries among her few
rural neighbors, but, beyond a vague, "They du say so, Ma'am," the
villagers had nothing to impart. The elusive specter had apparently
never had sufficient identity for a legend to crystallize about it,
and after a time the Boynes had laughingly set the matter down to their
profit-and-loss account, agreeing that Lyng was one of the few houses
good enough in itself to dispense with supernatural enhancements.

"And I suppose, poor, ineffectual demon, that's why it beats its
beautiful wings in vain in the void," Mary had laughingly concluded.

"Or, rather," Ned answered, in the same strain, "why, amid so much
that's ghostly, it can never affirm its separate existence as THE
ghost." And thereupon their invisible housemate had finally dropped out
of their references, which were numerous enough to make them promptly
unaware of the loss.

Now, as she stood on the hearth, the subject of their earlier curiosity
revived in her with a new sense of its meaning--a sense gradually
acquired through close daily contact with the scene of the lurking
mystery. It was the house itself, of course, that possessed the
ghost-seeing faculty, that communed visually but secretly with its own
past; and if one could only get into close enough communion with the
house, one might surprise its secret, and acquire the ghost-sight on
one's own account. Perhaps, in his long solitary hours in this very
room, where she never tr