e house;
the bedrooms are not done yet. The servants' accommodation is very bad
too, and there was no proper cooking-range in the kitchen. But the worst
of all is the ghost. Directly I heard of it I knew we should have
trouble with the servants; and we had not been here a month when our
cook, who had lived with us for years, gave warning because the place
was damp. At first she said it was the ghost, but when I told her not to
talk such nonsense she said it was the damp. And then it is so awkward
about visitors. What are we to do when the fishing season begins? I
cannot get George to understand that some people have a great objection
to anything of the kind, and are quite angry if you put them into a
haunted room. And it is much worse than having only one haunted room,
because we could make that into a bachelor's bedroom--I don't think they
mind; or a linen cupboard, as they do at Wimbourne Castle; but this
ghost seems to appear in all the rooms, and even in the halls and
passages, so I cannot think what we are to do."

I said it was extraordinary, and I meant it. That a ghost should venture
into Atherley's neighbourhood was less amazing than that it should
continue to exist in his wife's presence, so much more fatal than his
eloquence to all but the tangible and the solid. Her orthodoxy is above
suspicion, but after some hours of her society I am unable to
contemplate any aspects of life save the comfortable and the
uncomfortable: while the Universe itself appears to me only a gigantic
apparatus especially designed to provide Lady Atherley and her class
with cans of hot water at stated intervals, costly repasts elaborately
served, and all other requisites of irreproachable civilisation.

But before I had time to say more, Atherley in his smoking-coat looked
in to see if I was coming or not.

"Don't keep Mr. Lyndsay up late, George," said my kind hostess; "he
looks so tired."

"You look dead beat," he said later on, in his own particular and untidy
den, as he carefully stuffed the bowl of his pipe. "I think it would go
better with you, old chap, if you did not hold yourself in quite so
tight. I don't want you to rave or commit suicide in some untidy
fashion, as the hero of a French novel does; but you are as well-behaved
as a woman, without a woman's grand resources of hysterics and general
unreasonableness all round. You always were a little too good for human
nature's daily food. Your notions on some points are qu