She obeyed him, and, as he followed her in, he shut the door.

She sat down, and for a while he stood before her, gazing sympathetically into her flushed, tear-stained face.

“I’m afraid you’ll think it so absurd,” she said falteringly.  “Even I can hardly believe now that what happened did happen!”

“Don’t tell me—­if you’d rather not,” he said suddenly; a very disagreeable suspicion entering his mind.

Was it within the bounds of possibility that James Tapster had tried to—­to kiss her?  Sir Lyon had a great prejudice against the poor millionaire, but he instantly rejected the idea.  If such a thing had indeed happened to her, Helen Brabazon was the last girl ever to offer to tell anyone, least of all a man.

Helen all at once felt that it would be a comfort to confide her strange, terrifying experience to this kind new friend.

“I’d rather tell you, I think.”

She waited a moment, and then came out with a bald statement of what had happened.  “I was sitting knitting, when something seemed to force me to look up—­and I saw, or I thought I saw, the spirit of a dear, dead friend.”

Sir Lyon uttered an exclamation of extreme astonishment.

“Yes, I know it was only my imagination,” Helen went on in a low, troubled voice.  “But it gave me a most fearful shock, and I feel that, however long I live, I shall never forget it!”

“I wish you would tell me a little more about it,” he said persuasively.  “I don’t ask out of idle curiosity.  I was very much impressed by what happened on the first night of our visit here—­I mean at the seance.”

“So was I,” she said reluctantly.  “But, of course, this had nothing to do with—­with anything of that sort.  In fact, Bubbles (as she has asked me to call her) was sitting, asleep, I think, in that curious old carved confessional box.  My aunt and Mr. Varick were reading—­Mr. Varick had just come up from the village with this morning’s London papers; Miss Farrow was doing her embroidery, and I’d just been counting some stitches in my knitting, when I looked up and saw—­”

She stopped, as if not able to go on.

“Was what you saw, what you took to be an apparition, close to the confessional?” asked Sir Lyon abruptly.

“No, not so very close—­still, not very far away.  It—­she—­seemed to be standing behind Mr. Varick, a little to his left, on the door side.”

“I suppose you would rather not tell me who it was you saw?”

Sir Lyon thought he knew, but he wished to feel sure.

“I don’t see why I shouldn’t tell you,” yet she hesitated.  “It was poor Milly, Sir Lyon—­I mean Mrs. Lionel Varick.  She and I became great friends during the weeks preceding her death.  She even told me that, apart from her husband, she had never cared for anyone as she grew to care for me.  And yet—­oh, Sir Lyon, what was so very, very terrible just now, was that I felt her looking at me with a kind of hatred in her dead face,” and, as she uttered these last words, an expression of deep pain came over Helen Brabazon’s countenance.