Janet, however, listened, and with a growing and fascinated attention, to the old tale.  Was there some real connection, she wondered, between it and the creature who had been prowling round the farm?  Was some one personating the ghost, and for what reason?  The same queries were ardently in the mind of Dempsey.  He reported Halsey’s adventure, commenting on it indignantly.

“It’s some one as knows the story, and is playin’ the fool with it.  It’s a very impudent thing to do!  It’s not playing fair, that’s what it isn’t; and I’d like to get hold of him.”

Janet’s mouth twitched.  The young man’s proprietorial interest in his grandfather’s crime, and annoyance that any one should interfere with it, turned the whole thing to comedy.  Moreover, his fatuous absorption in that side of the matter made him useless for any other purpose:  so that she soon ceased from cross-examining him, and he rose to go.

“Well, I’m sorry not to have seen Miss Henderson,” he said awkwardly, twisting his cap.  “I’d like to have had a talk with her about Canada.  It was old Halsey told me she’d lived in Canada.”

“Yes,” said Janet irresponsively.

Dempsey smiled broadly and seemed embarrassed.  At last he said with a jerk:—­

“I wonder if Miss Henderson ever knew a man called Tanner—­who lived near Winnipeg?”

“I never heard her speak of him.”

“Because”—­he still twirled—­“when I saw Miss Henderson at Millsborough that day of the rally, I thought as I’d seen her before.”

“Oh?” said Janet ardently.  But some instinct put her on her guard.

“Dick Tanner, they called him, was a man—­an artist chap—­who lived not far from the man I was with—­and I once saw a lady there just like Miss Henderson.”

“Did you?”

Dempsey grew bolder.

“Only it couldn’t have been Miss Henderson, you see—­because this lady I saw was a Mrs. Delane.  But was Mrs. Delane perhaps a relation of Miss Henderson?  She was just like Miss Henderson.”

“I’ll ask Miss Henderson,” said Janet, moving towards the door, as a signal to him to take his leave.  “But I expect you’re confusing her with some one else.”

Dempsey, however, began rather eagerly to dot the i’s.  The picture of the snowstorm, of the woman at the door, various points in his description of her, and of the solitary—­apparently bachelor—­owner of the farm, began to affect Janet uncomfortably.  She got rid of the chatter-box as soon as possible, and went slowly to the kitchen, to get supper ready.  As she fried the bacon, and took some vegetables out of the hay-box, she was thinking fast.

Tanner?  No—­she had never heard Rachel mention the name.  But it happened that Dempsey had given a precise date.  It was in the “November before they Passed Conscription” in Canada, i.e. before he himself was called up—­that he saw Mrs. Delane, at night, in Dick Tanner’s house.  And Janet remembered that, according to the story which as they two sat by the fire alone at night, when the girls were gone to bed, Rachel had gradually built up before her.  It was in that same month that Rachel had been deserted by Delane; who had gone off to British Columbia with the Italian girl, as his wife afterwards knew, leaving Rachel alone on the farm—­with one Japanese servant.