“Don’t you say it too!” he exclaimed, sharply distressed.

“I know I acted stupidly—­in fact, as we’re in a church I don’t mind saying I acted very wrongly last night.”

Bubbles spoke in a serious tone—­more seriously, indeed, than she had ever yet spoken to her faithful, long-suffering friend.  “But a great deal of what happens to me and round me, Bill, I can’t help—­I wish I could,” she said slowly.

“I don’t quite understand.”  There was a painful choking feeling in his throat.  “Try and tell me what you mean, Bubbles.”

“What I mean is clear enough”—­she now spoke with a touch of impatience.  “I mean that wherever I am, They come too, and gather about me.  It wasn’t my fault that that horrible Thing appeared to Pegler as soon as I entered the house.”

“But why should you think the ghost Pegler saw—­if she did see it—­had anything to do with you?  Wyndfell Hall has been haunted for over a hundred years—­so the village people say.”

“Pegler saw nothing till I came.  And though I struggle against the belief, and though I very seldom admit it, even to myself, I know quite well, Bill, that I’m never really alone—­never free of Them unless—­unless, Bill, I’m in a holy place, when they don’t dare to come.”

There was a tone of fear, of awful dread, in her voice.  In spite of himself he felt impressed.

“But why should they come specially round you?” he asked uneasily.

“You know as well as I do that I’m a strong medium.  But I’ll tell you, Bill, something which I’ve never told you before.”

“Yes,” he said, with a strange sinking of the heart.  “What’s that, Bubbles?”

“You know that Persian magician, or Wise Man, whom certain people in London went cracked over last spring?”

“The man you would go and see?”

“Yes, of course I mean that man.  Well, when he saw me he made his interpreter tell me that he had a special message for me—­”

Bubbles was leaning forward now, her hands resting on Bill’s shoulders.  “I wonder if I ought to tell you all he said,” she whispered.  “Perhaps I ought to keep it secret.”

“Of course you ought to tell me!  What was the message?”

“He said that I had rent the veil, wilfully, and that I was often surrounded by the evil demons who had come rushing through; that only by fasting and praying could I hope to drive them back, and close the rent which I had made.”

“I shouldn’t allow myself to think too much of what he said,” said Bill hoarsely.  “And yet—­and yet, Bubbles?  There may have been something in it—.”

He spoke very earnestly, poor boy.

“Of course there was a great deal in it.  But they’re not always demons,” she said slowly.  “Now, for instance, as I sit here, where good, simple people have been praying together for hundreds of years, the atmosphere is kind and holy, not wicked and malignant, as it was last night.”