“Why, Jack,” she cried, “what have you been doing?  What has happened?  Are you ill?” Thus driven into a direct lie, I said that the sun had been a little too much for me.  It was close upon five o’clock of a cloudy April afternoon, and the sun had been hidden all day.  I saw my mistake as soon as the words were out of my mouth:  attempted to recover it; blundered hopelessly and followed Kitty, in a regal rage, out of doors, amid the smiles of my acquaintances.  I made some excuse (I have forgotten what) on the score of my feeling faint; and cantered away to my hotel, leaving Kitty to finish the ride by herself.

In my room I sat down and tried calmly to reason out the matter.  Here was I, Theobald Jack Pansay, a well-educated Bengal Civilian in the year of grace 1885, presumably sane, certainly healthy, driven in terror from my sweetheart’s side by the apparition of a woman who had been dead and buried eight months ago.  These were facts that I could not blink.  Nothing was further from my thought than any memory of Mrs. Wessington when Kitty and I left Hamilton’s shop.  Nothing was more utterly commonplace than the stretch of wall opposite Peliti’s.  It was broad daylight.  The road was full of people; and yet here, look you, in defiance of every law of probability, in direct outrage of Nature’s ordinance, there had appeared to me a face from the grave.

Kitty’s Arab had gone through the ’rickshaw:  so that my first hope that some woman marvelously like Mrs. Wessington had hired the carriage and the coolies with their old livery was lost.  Again and again I went round this treadmill of thought; and again and again gave up baffled and in despair.  The voice was as inexplicable as the apparition.  I had originally some wild notion of confiding it all to Kitty; of begging her to marry me at once; and in her arms defying the ghostly occupant of the ’rickshaw.  “After all,” I argued, “the presence of the ’rickshaw is in itself enough to prove the existence of a spectral illusion.  One may see ghosts of men and women, but surely never of coolies and carriages.  The whole thing is absurd.  Fancy the ghost of a hill-man!”

Next morning I sent a penitent note to Kitty, imploring her to overlook my strange conduct of the previous afternoon.  My Divinity was still very wroth, and a personal apology was necessary.  I explained, with a fluency born of night-long pondering over a falsehood, that I had been attacked with a sudden palpitation of the heart—­the result of indigestion.  This eminently practical solution had its effect; and Kitty and I rode out that afternoon with the shadow of my first lie dividing us.