“Ah, no,” I said.  “I could not be.  The portrait is very beautiful.”

“You are more like her,” he repeated.

We had left the doors of the gallery ajar, and now we heard plainly a heavy foot coming up the stairs and puffing and wheezing as of a very stout, asthmatic person ascending.

“It is Bridget Kelly,” he said, turning and smiling at me.  “She was much disturbed that I would not have her as cicerone, but she remembered me from the old days, and, seeing that I would not have her, she left me to mind the house while she did her marketing.”

“I found the door open when I came to it,” I said.

“Bridget must have left it so.  I dare say the house has a ghostly reputation and is shunned.  And now, do you know why I did not go treasure-hunting?”

“How should I know?” I answered him.

He caught me suddenly into his arms.

“Because, Bawn, my darling,” he said, “the dead has come alive again.”

CHAPTER XVII

THE WILL OF OTHERS

He let me go gently just as the old foot touched the top step of the stairs, and Bridget Kelly, a little, fat, rosy, smiling woman, much pleasanter of expression than her sister, Maureen, came into the gallery.

“Why, bless me, Captain Cardew,” she said, “who have you found?  There is a cabman at the door who would have it that he was waiting for a young lady, although I told him no young lady had come in but only a gentleman.”

“Look and see who it is, Bridget,” Captain Cardew answered her.

She looked at me in a momentary bewilderment.  Then she flung her arms about me.

“Why, it must be Miss Bawn,” she cried.  “Miss Bawn, and the image of her Ladyship, yet more red in the cheeks than her Ladyship had, except maybe when his Lordship was courting her.  And where did you come from at all, Miss Bawn? or did the sky open to let you fall through?”

“I came by the cab, Bridget.  I am in Dublin on a visit with Miss Champion.  You remember Miss Champion?”

“Is it Miss Mary?  Aye, troth, I do remember her.  ’Tis mistress of this house she ought to be by rights, leastways when his Lordship and her Ladyship are gone to their rest; and long may it be before they go!  So you’re here with Miss Mary, Miss Bawn, honey?  And wasn’t it the quarest thing at all that you should walk into the house and find Captain Anthony in it?”

“I was nearly running out of it,” I said.  “I was frightened of all the empty rooms.  The sound of the hall door shutting frightened me most of all.  I was about to run out of the house when I met Captain Cardew.”

“Ah, sure, and you weren’t frightened then?” the old woman said in a coaxing way.  “You wouldn’t be frightened with Captain Anthony to take care of you?—­no lady would.  Sure, dear, I’ve lived in it many a year my lone self, and worse than myself I’ve never seen, though they do have quare ould stories about it.  I wouldn’t be frightened, itself, if I did see anything, only spake bouldly to it and ax it what was keepin’ it from its rest.”