ite unwholesomely
superfine. It would be a comfort to see you let out in some way. I wish
you would have a real good fling for once."

"I should have to pay too dear for it afterwards. My superfine habits
are not a matter of choice only, you must remember."

"Oh!--the women! Not the best of them is worth bothering about, let
alone a shameless jilt."

"You were always hard upon her, George. She jilted a cripple for a very
fine specimen of the race. Some of your favourite physiologists would
say she was quite right."

"You never understood her, Lindy. It was not a case of jilting a cripple
at all. She jilted three thousand a year and a small place for ten
thousand a year and a big one."

After all, it did hurt a little, which Atherley must have divined, for
crossing the room on some pretext or another he let his strong hand
rest, just for an instant, gently upon my shoulder, thus, after the
manner of his race, mutely and concisely expressing affection and
sympathy that might have swelled a canto.

"I shall be sorry," he said presently, lying rather than sitting in the
deep chair beside the fire, "very sorry, if the ghost is going to make
itself a nuisance."

"What is the story of the ghost?"

"Story! God bless you, it has none to tell, sir; at least it never has
told it, and no one else rightly knows it. It--I mean the ghost--is
older than the family. We found it here when we came into the place
about two hundred years ago, and it refused to be dislodged. It is
rather uncertain in its habits. Sometimes it is not heard of for years;
then all at once it reappears, generally, I may observe, when some
imaginative female in the house is in love, or out of spirits, or bored
in any other way. She sees it, and then, of course--the complaint being
highly infectious--so do a lot more. One of the family started the
theory it was the ghost of the portrait, or rather the unknown
individual whose portrait hangs high up over the sideboard in the
dining-room."

"You don't mean the lady in green velvet with the snuff-box?"

"Certainly not; that is my own great-grand-aunt. I mean a square of
black canvas with one round yellow spot in the middle and a dirty white
smudge under the spot. There are members of this family--Aunt Eleanour,
for instance--who tell me the yellow spot is a man's face and the dirty
white smudge is an Elizabethan ruff. Then there is a picture of a man in
armour in the oak room, which I don't believe is a p