There are many ghosts that haunt the House by the Sea.  Jay is, of course, one of them, and for this reason she knows more about ghosts than any one I know.  Fragments of untold stories are familiar to her.  She knows how you may hear in the dark a movement by your bed, and fling out your hand and feel it grasped, and then feel the grasp slide up from your hand to your shoulder, from your shoulder to your throat, from your throat to your heart.  She knows how you may go between trees in the moonlight to meet your friend, and find suddenly that some one is keeping pace with you, and how you, mistaking this companion for your friend, may say some silly greeting that only your friend understands.  And how your heart drops as you hear the first breath of the reply.  She knows how, walking in the mid-day streets of London, you may cross the path of some Great One who had a prior right by many thousand years to walk beside the Thames.  These are the ghost stories that never get told.  Few people can read them between the lines of press accounts of inquests, or in the dignified announcements of the failure of hearts, on the front page of the Morning Post.  But Jay knows, because of her intimacy with the House by the Sea.  There she meets her fellow-ghosts.

The House, as I told you, has hardly any garden; having the sea, it doesn’t need one.  But there is a little formal place about twenty paces across, set, as it were, in the heart of the House.  A small prim square, bounded on the north, south and east by the House itself, and on the west by the cliff and the sea.  There is a stone balustrade to divide the garden from space.  In the middle of the square is a stone basin with becalmed water-lilies and of course goldfish.  Round the basin the orderly ranks of little clipped box hedges manoeuvre.  The untamed elements in the garden are the climbing things, they sing in gold and yellow and orange and red from the walls.  The only official way into the garden is a door from the House, a bald door without eyebrows, so to speak, like all the doors and windows in the House.  But there is an unofficial way into the garden, and Jay found her Secret Friend there.  This is the short cut to the sea.  In other words, it is a wriggly ladder, one end of which you attach to a hook in the wall, and the other you throw over the balustrade down the cliff to the sea.  It is a long way to walk round the House and along the cliff and down to the sea by the path.  And just as the house-agents always want to be one minute and a half from the church and the post-office, so we in the Secret House cannot afford to be more than a minute and a half from the sea.

The Secret Friend was there, and he was gazing so earnestly down the cliff that his hair was hanging forward most unbeautifully, and he was rather red in the face.  He was looking at a little boat which was on its way towards the foot of the wriggly ladder.  A schooner with the low sun climbing down her rigging breathed on the breathing sea not far away.  The tide was high.