“Now, what can I say, and how can I describe to you, all you skeptical men sitting there with pipes in your mouths, the amazing sensation I experienced of holding an intangible, impalpable thing so closely to my heart that it touched my body with equal pressure all the way down, and then melted away somewhere into my very being?  For it was like seizing a rush of cool wind and feeling a touch of burning fire the moment it had struck its swift blow and passed on.  A series of shocks ran all over and all through me; a momentary ecstasy of flaming sweetness and wonder thrilled down into me; my heart gave another great leap—­and then I was alone.

“The room was empty.  I turned on the gas and struck a match to prove it.  All fear had left me, and something was singing round me in the air and in my heart like the joy of a spring morning in youth.  Not all the devils or shadows or hauntings in the world could then have caused me a single tremor.

“I unlocked the door and went all over the dark house, even into kitchen and cellar and up among the ghostly attics.  But the house was empty.  Something had left it.  I lingered a short hour, analyzing, thinking, wondering—­you can guess what and how, perhaps, but I won’t detail, for I promised only essentials, remember—­and then went out to sleep the remainder of the night in my own flat, locking the door behind me upon a house no longer haunted.

“But my uncle, Sir Henry, the owner of the house, required an account of my adventure, and of course I was in duty bound to give him some kind of a true story.  Before I could begin, however, he held up his hand to stop me.

“‘First,’ he said, ’I wish to tell you a little deception I ventured to practice on you.  So many people have been to that house and seen the ghost that I came to think the story acted on their imaginations, and I wished to make a better test.  So I invented for their benefit another story, with the idea that if you did see anything I could be sure it was not due merely to an excited imagination.’

“’Then what you told me about a woman having been murdered, and all that, was not the true story of the haunting?’

“’It was not.  The true story is that a cousin of mine went mad in that house, and killed himself in a fit of morbid terror following upon years of miserable hypochondriasis.  It is his figure that investigators see.’

“‘That explains, then,’ I gasped——­

“‘Explains what?’

“I thought of that poor struggling soul, longing all these years for escape, and determined to keep my story for the present to myself.

“‘Explains, I mean, why I did not see the ghost of the murdered woman,’ I concluded.

“‘Precisely,’ said Sir Henry, ’and why, if you had seen anything, it would have had value, inasmuch as it could not have been caused by the imagination working upon a story you already knew.’”

FOOTNOTE: 

[I] Taken by permission from “The Listener and Other Stories,”—­E.P.  Dutton & Co.