“Certainly.  Though, did not that pretty niece of Mrs. Molyneux’s say she used to see those spots floating before her eyes when a misfortune was impending?”

“I fancy she did, and true enough too, as such spots would very likely precede a bilious attack, which is misfortune enough while it lasts.  But still, even Mrs. Molyneux’s niece, even Mrs. Molyneux herself, would not say the fever faces, or the reptiles, or the spots, were supernatural.  And in fact the ghost is, so far, more—­more recherche, let us say, than the other things.  It takes more than a bilious attack or a fever, or even D.T., to produce a ghost.  It takes nothing less than a pretty high degree of nervous sensibility and excitable imagination.  Now these two disorders have not been much developed yet by the masses, in spite of the school-boards:  ergo, any apparition which leads to hysterics or brandy-and-water in the servants’ hall is a bogie, not a ghost.”

He knocked the ashes out of his pipe, and added: 

“And now, Lindy, as we don’t want another ghost haunting the house.  I will conduct you to by-by.”

It was a strange house, Weald Manor, designed, one might suppose, by some inveterate enemy of light.  It lay at the foot of a steep hill which screened it from the morning sun, and the few windows which looked towards the rising day were so shaped as to admit but little of its brightness.  At night it was even worse, at least in the halls and passages, for there, owing probably to the dark oak which lined both walls and floor, a generous supply of lamps did little more than illumine the surface of the darkness, leaving unfathomed and unexplained mysterious shadows that brooded in distant corners, or, towering giant-wise to the ceiling, loomed ominously overhead.  Will-o’-the-wisp-like reflections from our lighted candles danced in the polished surface of panel and balustrade, as from the hall we went upstairs, I helping myself from step to step by Atherley’s arm, as instinctively, as unconsciously almost, as he offered it.  We stopped on the first landing.  Before us rose the stairs leading to the gallery where Atherley’s bedroom was:  to our left ran “the bachelor’s passage,” where I was lodged.

“Night, night,” were Atherley’s parting words.  “Don’t dream of flirts or ghosts, but sleep sound.”

Sleep sound! the kind words sounded like mockery.  Sleep to me, always chary of her presence, was at best but a fair-weather friend, instantly deserting me when pain or exhaustion made me crave the more for rest and forgetfulness; but I had something to do in the interim—­a little auto-da-fe to perform, by which, with that faith in ceremonial, so deep laid in human nature, I meant once for all to lay the ghost that haunted me—­the ghost of a delightful but irrevocable past, with which I had dallied too long.

Sitting before the wood-fire I slowly unfolded them:  the three faintly-perfumed sheets with the gilt monogram above the pointed writing: