There was a look on her face he had never seen there before—­a very troubled, questioning, perplexed look.

“I saw something too, Lionel,” she said in a low voice; “I—­I saw more than Helen Brabazon admits to having seen.”

“You saw something?” he echoed incredulously.

“Yes, and were it not that I am an older woman, and have more self-control than your young friend, I should have cried out too.”

“What did you see?” he asked slowly.

“What I think I saw—­for I am quite convinced that I saw nothing at all, and that the extraordinary phenomenon or vision, call it what you will, was only another of Bubbles’ tricks—­what I saw—­” She stopped dead.  She found it extraordinarily difficult to go on.

“Yes?” he said sharply.  “Please tell me, Blanche.  What is it you saw, or thought you saw?”

“I thought I saw two women standing just behind your chair,” she said deliberately.

Varick made a violent movement—­so violent that it knocked over a rather solid little oak stool which always stood before the fire.  “I beg your pardon!” he exclaimed; and, stooping, picked the stool up again.  Then, “What sort of women?” he asked; and though he tried to speak lightly, he failed, and knew he failed.

“It isn’t very easy to describe them,” she said reluctantly.  “The one was a stout young woman, with a gipsy type of face—­that’s the best way I can describe it.  But the other—­”

She waited a full minute, but Varick did not, could not, speak.

She went on: 

“The other, Lionel, looked more like—­well, like what a ghost is supposed to look like!  She was swathed in white from head to foot, and she appeared—­I don’t quite know how to describe it—­as if at once alive and dead.  Her face looked dead, but her eyes looked alive.”

“Had you ever seen either of these women before—­I mean in life?”

He had turned away from her, and was staring into the fire.

“No; I’ve never seen anyone in the least like either of them.”

Varick moved a few steps, and then, as if hardly knowing what he was doing, he began turning over the leaves of the picture paper Miss Burnaby had been reading.

“Do you suppose that Helen Brabazon saw exactly what you saw?” he asked at last.

“No, I’m sure she didn’t; for the younger-looking woman had already disappeared, it was as if she faded into nothingness, before Helen Brabazon called out,”—­there was a hesitating, dubious tone in Blanche’s voice.  “But of course we can’t tell what exactly she did see.  She may have seen something—­someone—­quite different from what I thought I saw.”

Varick began staring into the fire again, and Blanche felt intolerably nervous and uncomfortable.  “I think, Lionel, that I must speak to Bubbles very seriously!” she said at last.  “I haven’t a doubt now that she really has got some uncanny power—­a power of stirring the imagination—­of making those about her think they see visions.”