Atherley it was, of course, who propounded this simple interpretation of the night’s alarms, as he sat in his smoking-room reviewing his trout-flies after an early breakfast we had taken with the Canon.

“You always account for the mechanism, but not for the effect.  Why should indigestion take that mental form?”

“Why, because indigestion constantly does in sleep, and out of it as well, for that matter.  A nightmare is not always a sense of oppression on the chest only; it may be an overpowering dread of something you dream you see.  Indigestion can produce, waking or asleep, a very good imitation of what is experienced in a blue funk.  And there is another kind of dream which is produced by fasting—­that, I need hardly say, I have never experienced.  Indeed, I don’t dream.”

“But the ghost—­the ghost he almost saw.”

“The sinking horror produced the ghost, instead of vice versa, as you might suppose.  It is like a dream.  In unpleasant dreams we fancy it is the dream itself which makes us feel uncomfortable.  It is just the other way round.  It is the discomfort that produces the dream.  Have you ever dreamt you were tramping through snow, and felt cold in consequence?  I did the other night.  But I did not feel cold because I dreamt I was walking through snow, but because I had not enough blankets on my bed; and because I felt cold I dreamt about the snow.  Don’t you know the dream you make up in a few moments about the knocking at the door when they call you in the morning?  And ghosts are only waking dreams.”

“I wonder if you ever had an illusion yourself—­gave way to it, I mean.  You were in love once—­twice,” I added hastily, in deference to Lady Atherley.

“Only once,” said Atherley, calmly.  “Do you ever see her now, Lindy?  She has grown enormously fat.  Certainly I have had my illusions, and I don’t object to them when they are pleasant and harmless—­on the contrary.  Now, falling in love, if you don’t fall too deep, is pleasant, and it never lasts long enough to do much mischief.  Marriage, of course, you will say, may be mischievous—­only for the individual, it is useful for the race.  What I object to is the deliberate culture of illusions which are not pleasant but distinctly depressing, like half your religious beliefs.”

“George,” said Lady Atherley, coming into the room at this instant; “have you—­oh, dear! what a state this room is in!”

“It is the housemaids.  They never will leave things as I put them.”

“And it was only dusted and tidied an hour ago.  Mr. Lyndsay, did you ever see anything like it?”

I said “Never.”

“If Lindy has a fault in this world, it is that he is as pernickety, as my old nurse used to say—­as pernickety as an old maid.  The stiff formality of his room would give me the creeps, if anything could.  The first thing I always want to do when I see it is to make hay in it.”