g to-day.

Something had again been said about Miss Burnaby and her niece staying
on, and she had heard Varick pressing them earnestly to do so; but the
old lady had been unwilling to break her plan, the more so that she had
an appointment with her dentist. Then Varick had asked why Miss Brabazon
shouldn't stay on till Saturday? There had been a considerable
discussion about it; but Blanche secretly hoped they would all go away.
She felt tired and unlike herself. The events of the last few days had
shaken her badly.

What an extraordinary difference a few moments can make in one's outlook
on life! Blanche Farrow was uncomfortably aware that she would never
forget what had happened to her on New Year's Eve. That strange and
fearful experience had obliterated some of her clearest mental
landmarks. She wished to think, she tried very hard to think, that in
some mysterious way the vision she had seen with such terrible
distinctness had been a projection from Bubbles' brain--Bubbles' uncanny
gift working, perchance, on Lionel Varick's mind and memory. She could
not doubt that the two wraiths she had seen so clearly purported to be a
survival of the human personalities of the two women who each had borne
Varick's name, and had been, for a while, so closely linked with him....

Yet long ago, when quite a young woman, she had come to the deliberate
conclusion that there was no such survival of human personality.

Taking up Mark Gifford's mysterious telegram, and one or two
unimportant letters she had just received, she went downstairs, to see,
as she came into the dining-room, that only Varick was already down.

He looked up, and she was shocked to see how ill and strained he looked.
He had taken poor little Bubbles' accident terribly to heart; Blanche
knew he had a feeling--which was rather absurd, after all,--that he in
some way could have prevented it.

But as he saw her come in his face lightened, and she felt touched. Poor
Lionel! He was certainly very, very fond of her.

"I do hope Helen Brabazon will stay on with you and Bubbles," he said
eagerly. "I think I've nearly persuaded Miss Burnaby to let her do so.
Do say a word to her, Blanche?"

"I will, if you like. But in that case, hadn't we better ask Sir Lyon to
stay on, too?"

"Dilsford!" he exclaimed. "Why on earth should we think of doing that?"

Blanche smiled. "Where are your eyes?" she asked. "Sir Lyon's head over
heels in love with Helen Brabazon; and I