“You look dead beat,” he said later on, in his own particular and untidy den, as he carefully stuffed the bowl of his pipe.  “I think it would go better with you, old chap, if you did not hold yourself in quite so tight.  I don’t want you to rave or commit suicide in some untidy fashion, as the hero of a French novel does; but you are as well-behaved as a woman, without a woman’s grand resources of hysterics and general unreasonableness all round.  You always were a little too good for human nature’s daily food.  Your notions on some points are quite unwholesomely superfine.  It would be a comfort to see you let out in some way.  I wish you would have a real good fling for once.”

“I should have to pay too dear for it afterwards.  My superfine habits are not a matter of choice only, you must remember.”

“Oh!—­the women!  Not the best of them is worth bothering about, let alone a shameless jilt.”

“You were always hard upon her, George.  She jilted a cripple for a very fine specimen of the race.  Some of your favourite physiologists would say she was quite right.”

“You never understood her, Lindy.  It was not a case of jilting a cripple at all.  She jilted three thousand a year and a small place for ten thousand a year and a big one.”

After all, it did hurt a little, which Atherley must have divined, for crossing the room on some pretext or another he let his strong hand rest, just for an instant, gently upon my shoulder, thus, after the manner of his race, mutely and concisely expressing affection and sympathy that might have swelled a canto.

“I shall be sorry,” he said presently, lying rather than sitting in the deep chair beside the fire, “very sorry, if the ghost is going to make itself a nuisance.”

“What is the story of the ghost?”

“Story!  God bless you, it has none to tell, sir; at least it never has told it, and no one else rightly knows it.  It—­I mean the ghost—­is older than the family.  We found it here when we came into the place about two hundred years ago, and it refused to be dislodged.  It is rather uncertain in its habits.  Sometimes it is not heard of for years; then all at once it reappears, generally, I may observe, when some imaginative female in the house is in love, or out of spirits, or bored in any other way.  She sees it, and then, of course—­the complaint being highly infectious—­so do a lot more.  One of the family started the theory it was the ghost of the portrait, or rather the unknown individual whose portrait hangs high up over the sideboard in the dining-room.”

“You don’t mean the lady in green velvet with the snuff-box?”