when the highly bred college
girl failed?

It seemed so. At least his dark eyes met mine with intelligence; hers
held only bewilderment and fear.

"They are not ghosts," I said only.

"But how can you be sure?" she persisted.

Beneath the braid and the pomander lay the sheet of paper on which
Desire had written weeks before; the first page of that composition now
pouring gold into my hands. This I passed to Phillida.

"Do ghosts write?" I queried.

She read the lines aloud.

"'We walk upon the shadows of hills, across a level thrown, and pant
like climbers.'"

"They do write, people say, with ouija boards and mediums," she
murmured.

I looked at Vere with despair of sustaining this argument. He stood up
as if my appeal had been spoken, drawing her with him.

"Now that it's a decent hour, don't you think Cristina might give us
some breakfast?" he suggested. "I guess bacon and eggs would be sort of
restoring. If you feel up to taking my arm as far as the porch, Mr.
Locke, the fresh air might be good medicine, too."

I have speculated sometimes upon how civilized man would get through
days not spaced by his recurrent meals into three divisions. Those meals
are hyphens between his mind and his body, as it were. What sense of
humor can view too intensely a creature who must feed himself three
times a day? Are we not pleasantly urged out of our heroics and into the
normal by breakfast, luncheon and dinner? Deny it as we will, when we do
not heed them we are out of touch with nature.

We went downstairs.

After breakfast was over, Vere and I walked across the orchard to a seat
placed near the lake. There I sat down, while he remained standing in
his favorite attitude: one foot on a low boulder, his arm resting on his
knee as he gazed into the shallow, amber-tinted water. Fog still overlay
the countryside, but without bringing coolness. The damp heat was
stifling, almost tropical as the sun mounted higher in the hidden sky.

I watched my companion, waiting for him to speak. He appeared intent
upon the darting movements of a group of tiny fish, but I knew his
thoughts were afar.

"Mr. Locke, I didn't want to speak before Phillida, because it would not
do any good for her to hear what I have to say," he finally began. "It
is properly the answer to what you asked upstairs, about our believing
you had not imagined that story. Did anything slip out over the
window-sill when you were waking up?"

Startled, for I