“Not at all, not at all; but Lady Perilous, I assure you, is a very old fashioned chatelaine.  However, if you choose to risk it—­”

I found my cigarette-case in my hand, opened it, and selected one of its contents, which I placed between my lips.  As I was looking round for a match-box, the spectre courteously put his forefinger to the end of the cigarette, which lighted at once.

“Perhaps you wonder,” he remarked, “why I remain at Castle Perilous, the very one of all my places which I never could bear while I was alive—­as you call it?”

“I had a delicacy about asking,” I answered.

“Well,” he continued, “I am the family genius.”

“I might have guessed that,” I said.

He bowed and went on.  “It is hereditary in our house, and I hold the position of genius till I am relieved.  For example, when the family want to dig up the buried treasure under the old bridge, I thunder and lighten and cause such a storm that they desist.”

“Why on earth do you do that?” I asked.  “It seems hardly worth while to have a genius at all.”

“In the interests of the family morality.  The money would soon go on the turf, and on dice, drink, etc., if they excavated it; and then I work the curse, and bring off the prophecies, and so forth.”

“What prophecies?”

“Oh, the rigmarole the old family seer came out with before they burned him for an unpalatable prediction at the time of the ’15.  He was very much vexed about it, of course, and he just prophesied any nonsense of a disagreeable nature that came into his head.  You know what these crofter fellows are—­ungrateful, vindictive rascals.  He had been in receipt of outdoor relief for years.  Well, he prophesied stuff like this:  ’When the owl and the eagle meet on the same blasted rowan tree, then a lassie in a white hood from the east shall make the burn of Cross-cleugh run full red,’ and drivel of that insane kind.  Well, you can’t think what trouble that particular prophecy gave me.  It had to be fulfilled, of course, for the family credit, and I brought it off as near as, I flatter myself, it could be done.”

“Lady Perilous was telling me about it last night,” I said, with a shudder.  “It was a horrible affair,”

“Yes, no doubt, no doubt; a cruel business!  But how I am to manage some of them I’m sure I don’t know.  There’s one of them in rhyme.  Let me see, how does it go?

   “‘When Mackenzie lies in the perilous ha’,
   The wild Red Cock on the roof shall craw,
   And the lady shall flee ere the day shall daw,
   And the land shall girn in the deed man’s thraw.’

“The ‘crowing of the wild Red Cock’ means that the castle shall be burned down, of course (I’m beginning to know his style by this time), and the lady is to elope, and the laird—­that’s Lord Perilous—­is to expire in the ‘deed man’s thraw’:  that is the name the old people give the Secret Room.  And all this is to happen when a Mackenzie, a member of a clan with which we are at feud, sleeps in the Haunted Chamber—­where we are just now.  By the way, what is your name?”