espassed till the afternoon, her husband HAD
acquired it already, and was silently carrying the dread weight of
whatever it had revealed to him. Mary was too well-versed in the code of
the spectral world not to know that one could not talk about the ghosts
one saw: to do so was almost as great a breach of good-breeding as to
name a lady in a club. But this explanation did not really satisfy her.
"What, after all, except for the fun of the frisson," she reflected,
"would he really care for any of their old ghosts?" And thence she was
thrown back once more on the fundamental dilemma: the fact that one's
greater or less susceptibility to spectral influences had no particular
bearing on the case, since, when one DID see a ghost at Lyng, one did
not know it.

"Not till long afterward," Alida Stair had said. Well, supposing Ned HAD
seen one when they first came, and had known only within the last week
what had happened to him? More and more under the spell of the hour, she
threw back her searching thoughts to the early days of their tenancy,
but at first only to recall a gay confusion of unpacking, settling,
arranging of books, and calling to each other from remote corners of the
house as treasure after treasure of their habitation revealed itself to
them. It was in this particular connection that she presently recalled
a certain soft afternoon of the previous October, when, passing from the
first rapturous flurry of exploration to a detailed inspection of the
old house, she had pressed (like a novel heroine) a panel that opened at
her touch, on a narrow flight of stairs leading to an unsuspected flat
ledge of the roof--the roof which, from below, seemed to slope away on
all sides too abruptly for any but practised feet to scale.

The view from this hidden coign was enchanting, and she had flown down
to snatch Ned from his papers and give him the freedom of her discovery.
She remembered still how, standing on the narrow ledge, he had passed
his arm about her while their gaze flew to the long, tossed horizon-line
of the downs, and then dropped contentedly back to trace the arabesque
of yew hedges about the fish-pond, and the shadow of the cedar on the
lawn.

"And now the other way," he had said, gently turning her about within
his arm; and closely pressed to him, she had absorbed, like some long,
satisfying draft, the picture of the gray-walled court, the squat lions
on the gates, and the lime-avenue reaching up to the highr