ance and character, showed itself even to her weak
sight as her husband's; and she turned away to meet him, as he entered,
with the confession of her folly.

"It's really too absurd," she laughed out from the threshold, "but I
never CAN remember!"

"Remember what?" Boyne questioned as they drew together.

"That when one sees the Lyng ghost one never knows it."

Her hand was on his sleeve, and he kept it there, but with no response
in his gesture or in the lines of his fagged, preoccupied face.

"Did you think you'd seen it?" he asked, after an appreciable interval.

"Why, I actually took YOU for it, my dear, in my mad determination to
spot it!"

"Me--just now?" His arm dropped away, and he turned from her with a
faint echo of her laugh. "Really, dearest, you'd better give it up, if
that's the best you can do."

"Yes, I give it up--I give it up. Have YOU?" she asked, turning round on
him abruptly.

The parlor-maid had entered with letters and a lamp, and the light
struck up into Boyne's face as he bent above the tray she presented.

"Have YOU?" Mary perversely insisted, when the servant had disappeared
on her errand of illumination.

"Have I what?" he rejoined absently, the light bringing out the sharp
stamp of worry between his brows as he turned over the letters.

"Given up trying to see the ghost." Her heart beat a little at the
experiment she was making.

Her husband, laying his letters aside, moved away into the shadow of the
hearth.

"I never tried," he said, tearing open the wrapper of a newspaper.

"Well, of course," Mary persisted, "the exasperating thing is that
there's no use trying, since one can't be sure till so long afterward."

He was unfolding the paper as if he had hardly heard her; but after a
pause, during which the sheets rustled spasmodically between his hands,
he lifted his head to say abruptly, "Have you any idea HOW LONG?"

Mary had sunk into a low chair beside the fireplace. From her seat
she looked up, startled, at her husband's profile, which was darkly
projected against the circle of lamplight.

"No; none. Have YOU?" she retorted, repeating her former phrase with an
added keenness of intention.

Boyne crumpled the paper into a bunch, and then inconsequently turned
back with it toward the lamp.

"Lord, no! I only meant," he explained, with a faint tinge of
impatience, "is there any legend, any tradition, as to that?"

"Not that I know of," she answered; but the impuls