She nodded, throwing her hands out like a Frenchman.  “We needn’t keep the money for ourselves, Bill.  We can give it away, but—­I must either accept or leave,” and she repeated the shrugging gesture.  She sat down on the chair facing me, staring helplessly at the carpet.

“You say there was a scene?” I went on presently, “She insisted?”

“She begged me to continue,” my sister replied very quietly.  “She thinks—­that is, she has an idea or theory that there’s something about the place—­something she can’t get at quite.”  Frances stammered badly.  She knew I did not encourage her wild theories.

“Something she feels—­yes,” I helped her, more than curious.

“Oh, you know what I mean, Bill,” she said desperately.  “That the place is saturated with some influence that she is herself too positive or too stupid to interpret.  She’s trying to make herself negative and receptive, as she calls it, but can’t, of course, succeed.  Haven’t you noticed how dull and impersonal and insipid she seems, as though she had no personality?  She thinks impressions will come to her that way.  But they don’t—­”

“Naturally.”

“So she’s trying me—­us—­what she calls the sensitive and impressionable artistic temperament.  She says that until she is sure exactly what this influence is, she can’t fight it, turn it out, ‘get the house straight’, as she phrases it.”

Remembering my own singular impressions, I felt more lenient than I might otherwise have done.  I tried to keep impatience out of my voice.

“And this influence, what—­whose is it?”

We used the pronoun that followed in the same breath, for I answered my own question at the same moment as she did: 

“His.”  Our heads nodded involuntarily towards the floor, the dining room being directly underneath.

And my heart sank, my curiosity died away on the instant; I felt bored.  A commonplace haunted house was the last thing in the world to amuse or interest me.  The mere thought exasperated, with its suggestions of imagination, overwrought nerves, hysteria, and the rest.

Mingled with my other feelings was certainly disappointment.  To see a figure or feel a “presence,” and report from day to day strange incidents to each other would be a form of weariness I could never tolerate.

“But really, Frances,” I said firmly, after a moment’s pause, “it’s too far-fetched, this explanation.  A curse, you know, belongs to the ghost stories of early Victorian days.”  And only my positive conviction that there was something after all worth discovering, and that it most certainly was not this, prevented my suggesting that we terminate our visit forthwith, or as soon as we decently could.  “This is not a haunted house, whatever it is,” I concluded somewhat vehemently, bringing my hand down upon her odious portfolio.

My sister’s reply revived my curiosity sharply.

“I was waiting for you to say that.  Mabel says exactly the same.  He is in it—­but it’s something more than that alone, something far bigger and more complicated.”  Her sentence seemed to indicate the sketches, and though I caught the inference I did not take it up, having no desire to discuss them with her just them indeed, if ever.