“He’ll have to sleep in the haunted room.”

“That won’t matter.  He wouldn’t believe in a ghost, even if he saw one!  Be nice to him, for my sake; he was awfully good to me, Blanche.”

And Blanche Farrow softened.  There was a very good side to her friend Lionel.  He was one of those rare human beings who are, in a moral sense, greatly benefited by prosperity.  In old days, though his attractive, dominant personality had brought him much kindness, and even friendship, of a useful kind, his hand had always been, as Blanche Farrow knew well, more or less against every man.  But now?—­now he seemed to look at the world through rose-coloured glasses.

He glanced at the still very attractive woman standing by his side, his good-humour quite restored.  “A penny for your thoughts!” he said jokingly.

Blanche shook her head, smiling.  Not for very much more than a penny would she have told him the thought that had suddenly come, as such thoughts will do, into her mind.  That thought was, how extraordinary had been Varick’s transformation from what a censorious world might have called an unscrupulous adventurer into a generous man of position and substance—­all owing to the fact that some two years ago he had drifted across an unknown woman in a foreign hotel!

Even to Blanche there was something pathetic in the thought of “poor Milly,” whose birthplace and home this beautiful and strangely perfect old house had been.  It was Milly—­not that sinister figure that Pegler thought she had seen—­whose form ought to haunt Wyndfell Hall.  But there survived no trace, no trifling memento even, of the dead woman’s evidently colourless personality.

And as if Varick had guessed part of what was passing through her mind, “Any news of the ghost, Blanche?” he asked jokingly.  “How’s my friend Pegler this morning?”

“Pegler’s quite all right!  I’m the person who ought to have seen the ghost—­but of course I neither saw nor heard anything.”

As they came through into the hall where the rest of the party were gathered together, Blanche heard Helen Brabazon exclaim:  “This is a most wonderful old book, Mr. Varick!  It gives such a curious account of a ghost who is supposed to haunt this house—­the ghost of a most awfully wicked woman who killed her stepson by throwing him into the moat, and then drowned herself—­”

Mr. Tapster, who seldom contributed anything worth hearing to the conversation, suddenly remarked:  “The ghost has been seen within the last two days by one of the servants here.”

“Who told you that?” asked Varick sharply.

“My valet; I always hear all the news from him.”

Helen clapped her hands.  “How splendid!” she cried.  “That makes everything simply perfect!” She turned her eager, smiling face on Lionel Varick, “I’ve always longed to stay in a haunted house.  I wish the ghost would appear to me!”

“Don’t wish that, Miss Brabazon.”