arried their problem straight to Alida Stair, who had successfully
solved it in her own case; but it was not until they had rejected,
almost capriciously, several practical and judicious suggestions that
she threw it out: "Well, there's Lyng, in Dorsetshire. It belongs to
Hugo's cousins, and you can get it for a song."

The reasons she gave for its being obtainable on these terms--its
remoteness from a station, its lack of electric light, hot-water pipes,
and other vulgar necessities--were exactly those pleading in its
favor with two romantic Americans perversely in search of the economic
drawbacks which were associated, in their tradition, with unusual
architectural felicities.

"I should never believe I was living in an old house unless I was
thoroughly uncomfortable," Ned Boyne, the more extravagant of the two,
had jocosely insisted; "the least hint of 'convenience' would make me
think it had been bought out of an exhibition, with the pieces numbered,
and set up again." And they had proceeded to enumerate, with humorous
precision, their various suspicions and exactions, refusing to believe
that the house their cousin recommended was REALLY Tudor till they
learned it had no heating system, or that the village church was
literally in the grounds till she assured them of the deplorable
uncertainty of the water-supply.

"It's too uncomfortable to be true!" Edward Boyne had continued to exult
as the avowal of each disadvantage was successively wrung from her; but
he had cut short his rhapsody to ask, with a sudden relapse to distrust:
"And the ghost? You've been concealing from us the fact that there is no
ghost!"

Mary, at the moment, had laughed with him, yet almost with her laugh,
being possessed of several sets of independent perceptions, had noted a
sudden flatness of tone in Alida's answering hilarity.

"Oh, Dorsetshire's full of ghosts, you know."

"Yes, yes; but that won't do. I don't want to have to drive ten miles
to see somebody else's ghost. I want one of my own on the premises. IS
there a ghost at Lyng?"

His rejoinder had made Alida laugh again, and it was then that she had
flung back tantalizingly: "Oh, there IS one, of course, but you'll never
know it."

"Never know it?" Boyne pulled her up. "But what in the world constitutes
a ghost except the fact of its being known for one?"

"I can't say. But that's the story."

"That there's a ghost, but that nobody knows it's a ghost?"

"Well--not till