“Less, rather than more, for she’s convinced me that she sees into the minds of her subjects and builds up a kind of—­of—­”

“Description?” suggested the doctor.

“More than that—­I was going to say figure.  She described, as if she saw them standing there before her, people of whom she’d never even heard—­and the descriptions were absolutely exact.  But if you don’t mind, Panton—­”

He hesitated, and the other said, “Yes, Varick?”

“Well, I’d rather you leave all that sort of thing alone, as far as Bubbles Dunster is concerned.  Both Miss Farrow and I are very anxious that she shouldn’t be up to any more of her tricks while she’s here.  People don’t half like it, you see.  Even I didn’t like it.”

Somehow it was a comfort to Varick to talk freely about Bubbles to a stranger—­Bubbles had got on his nerves.  He would have given a good deal to persuade her to leave Wyndfell Hall; but he didn’t know how to set about it.  In a sense she was the soul of the party.  The others all liked her.  Yet he, himself, felt a sort of growing repugnance to her which he would have been hard put to it to explain.  Indeed, the only way he could explain it—­and he had thought a good deal about it the last few days—­was that she undoubtedly possessed an uncanny power of starting into life images which had lain long dormant in his brain.

For one thing—­but that, of course, might not be entirely Bubbles’ fault—­Milly, his poor wife, had become again terribly real to him.  It was almost as if he felt her to be alive, say, in the next room—­lying, as she had been wont to lie, listening for his footsteps, in the little watering place where they had spent the last few weeks of her life.

He could not but put down that unpleasant, sinister phenomenon to the presence of Bubbles, for he had been at Wyndfell Hall all the summer, and though the place had been Milly’s birthplace—­where, too, she had spent her melancholy, dull girlhood—­no thought of her had ever come to disturb his pleasure in the delightful, perfect house and its enchanting garden.  Of course, now and again some neighbour with whom he had made acquaintance would say a word to him indicating what a strange, solitary life the Faunceys, father and daughter, had led in their beautiful home, and how glad the speaker was that “poor Milly” had had a little happiness before she died.  To these remarks he, Varick, would of course answer appropriately, with that touch of sad reminiscence which carries with it no real regret or sorrow.

But during the last few days it had been otherwise.  He could not get Milly out of his mind, and he had come to feel that if this peculiar sensation continued, he would not be able to bring himself to stay on at Wyndfell Hall after the break-up of his present party.