you," murmured the girl despairingly.

Dick, who had thrown away his cousin's hand, caught it again, and
dragged her along the aisle of light to the window. The moon shone upon
his flushed and angry face.

"Listen!" he said; "you have been fooled, tricked--infamously tricked
by these people, and some confederate, whom--whom I shall horsewhip if I
catch. The whole story is a lie!"

"But you looked as if you believed it--about the girl," said Cecily;
"you acted so strangely. I even thought, Dick,--sometimes--you had seen
HIM."

Dick shuddered, trembled; but it is to be feared that the lower, more
natural human element in him triumphed.

"Nonsense!" he stammered; "the girl was a foolish farrago of
absurdities, improbable on the face of things, and impossible to prove.
But that infernal, sneaking rascal was flesh and blood."

It seemed to him to relieve the situation and establish his own
sanity to combat one illusion with another. Cecily had already been
deceived--another lie wouldn't hurt her. But, strangely enough, he was
satisfied that Cecily's visitant was real, although he still had doubts
about his own.

"Then you think, Dick, it was actually some real man?" she said
piteously. "Oh, Dick, I have been so foolish!"

Foolish she no doubt had been; pretty she certainly was, sitting there
in her loosened hair, and pathetic, appealing earnestness. Surely the
ghostly Rosita's glances were never so pleading as these actual honest
eyes behind their curving lashes. Dick felt a strange, new-born sympathy
of suffering, mingled tantalizingly with a new doubt and jealousy, that
was human and stimulating.

"Oh, Dick, what are WE to do?"

The plural struck him as deliciously sweet and subtle. Had they
really been singled out for this strange experience, or still stranger
hallucination? His arm crept around her; she gently withdrew from it.

"I must go now," she murmured; "but I couldn't sleep until I told you
all. You know, Dick, I have no one else to come to, and it seemed to me
that YOU ought to know it first. I feel better for telling you. You will
tell me to-morrow what you think we ought to do."

They reached the door, opening it softly. She lingered for a moment on
the threshold.

"Tell me, Dick" (she hesitated), "if that--that really were a spirit,
and not a real man,--you don't think that--that kiss" (she shuddered)
"could do me harm!"

He shuddered too, with a strange and sympathetic consciousness that,