Suddenly she started, for Timmy’s claw-like little hand was on her arm:  “Mum,” he said earnestly, “do tell me what Colonel Crofton was really like?  Did that lady—­you know, I mean the person Jack thinks is jealous of Mrs. Crofton—­tell you what he was like?”

“No—­yes—­oh, Timmy!  I’m afraid you must have been listening at the door just now?”

“I didn’t like to come in,” he said, wriggling uneasily.  “I’ve never heard Jack speak in such an angry way before.  He was in a wax, wasn’t he?  But, Mum, do tell me what Colonel Crofton looked like—­I do so want to know.”

She put down her pen, and turning, gazed down into the child’s eager, inquisitive little face.

“Why should you wish to know, Timmy?” She spoke rather coldly and sternly.

She was sorry indeed now that she had been tempted to repeat what was perhaps after all only the outcome of Miss Pendarth’s unconscious jealousy of the woman who had made a fool of the man she had loved as a girl.  It was unfortunately true that Olivia Pendarth had an unconscious prejudice against all young and pretty women.

“I want to know,” mumbled Timmy, “because I think I do know what he was like.”

“If you know what he was like, then there is nothing more to say.”

“I want to be sure,” he repeated obstinately.

“But how absurd, Timmy!  Why should you want to know about a poor old gentleman who is dead, and of whom you are not likely ever to hear anything?  I have often told you how horrid it is to be inquisitive.”

Timmy paused over that remark.  “I want to know,” he said in a low mumbling voice, “because I think I have seen him.”  He did not look up at his mother as he spoke.  With the forefinger of his right hand he began tracing an imaginary pattern on the blue serge skirt which covered her knee.

She looked around apprehensively.  Yes, the door was shut.  She remembered that Dr. O’Farrell had told her never to encourage the child’s confidences, but, on the other hand, never to check them.

“I first saw him the evening she came to supper,” Timmy mumbled.  “They were walking together down the avenue.  I thought he was a real old gentleman.  There was a dog with him, a terrier exactly like Flick, only a little bigger.  Of course I thought it was a real dog too.  But now I know that it wasn’t.  I know now that it was a ghost-dog.  It is that dog, Mum, that frightens the other dogs who meet them—­not herself, as she’s come to think.”

“Oh, Timmy,”—­Janet felt acutely uncomfortable—­“you know I cannot bear to think that such things really happen to you.  If you really think them I’d rather know, but I’d so much rather, dear boy, that you didn’t think them.”

But Timmy was absorbed in what he was saying.  “I know now that it was Colonel Crofton,” he went on, “because I’ve seen an old photograph of him, Mum.  Mrs. Crofton brought a tin box full of papers with her, and there were some old photographs in it.  There was one of an officer in uniform, and it had written across it, ‘Yours sincerely, Cecil Crofton.’  She tore it up the day after she came here, and threw it in the waste-paper basket, but her cook took it out of the dustbin, and that’s how I saw it.”