“Yes, there are a number of ghosts—­but the most persistent and disconcerting one is a very young girl who nightly falls through a secret door into my room.”

“How romantic!  What is she like?” Two violet eyes looked up at him full of that mischief which lies in the orbs of a kitten when it contemplates some fearsome crime, and has to appear especially innocent.

Michael thrilled.  If she had that expression he was quite ready to follow the lead.

“She is perfectly enchanting—­shall I tell you exactly what she wears—­and her every feature and the color of her eyes?  The wraith so materializes that I can describe it as accurately as I could describe you sitting next me.”

“Please do.”

“She is about five foot seven tall—­I mean she has grown as tall as that—­when she first appeared she could not have been taller than five foot five.”

“How strange!”

“Yes, isn’t it—­well, she has the most divine figure, quite slight and yet not scraggy—­you know the kind, I loathe them scraggy!”

“I hate fat people.”

“But she isn’t fat.  I tell you she is too sweet.  She has a round baby face with the loveliest violet eyes in the world and such a skin!—­like a velvet rose petal!” His unabashed regard penetrated Sabine who smiled slyly.

“You don’t mean to say you can see all these material things in a ghost!” she cried with an enchanting air of incredulity.

“Perfectly—­I have not half finished yet.  I have not told you about her mouth—­it is very curved and full and awfully red—­and there is the most adorable dimple up at one side of it, I am sure the people in the ghost world that she meets must awfully want to kiss it.”

Sabine frowned.  This was rather too intimate a description, but bashfulness or diffidence she knew were not among Mr. Arranstoun’s qualities—­or defects.

“I think I am tired of hearing what this ghost looks like, I want to know what does she do?  Aren’t you petrified with fright?”

“Not in the least,” Michael told her, “but you will just have to hear about her hair—­when it comes down it is like lovely bronze waves—­and her little feet, too—­they are exquisite enough in shoes and stockings, but without——!”

Here he had the grace to look at his fish which was just being handed.

A flush as pink as the pinkest rose came into Sabine’s cheeks—­he was perfectly disgraceful and this was of course in shocking taste—­but when he glanced up again his attractive blue eyes had her late look of an innocent kitten’s in them and he said in an angelic tone: 

“She has not a fault, you may believe me, and she jumps up after the fall into the room, and sits in one of my big chairs!”

“Does she scold you for your sins as denizens of another sphere ought to do?” Mrs. Howard was constrained to ask.

“No—­she is a little angel and always tells me that sins are forgiven.”