Thankful fought with her feelings.  She put a hand on the back of her neck and rubbed vigorously.  “Nonsense!” she declared, bravely.  “You imagined it.  Nonsense!  Whoever heard of a snorin’ ghost?”

But Miss Timpson only shook her head.  “Good-by, Thankful,” she said.  “I shan’t tell anybody; as I said, I didn’t mean to tell you.  If—­if you hear that anything’s happened to me—­happened sudden, you know—­you’ll understand.  You can tell Imogene and Mr. Daniels and Mr. Hammond that I—­that I’ve gone visiting to my cousin Sarah’s.  That’ll be true, anyway.  Good-by.  You may see me again in this life, but I doubt it.”

She hurried away along the path.  Thankful reentered the house and stood in the middle of the kitchen floor, thinking.  Then she walked steadily to the foot of the back stairs, ascended them, and walked straight to the apartments so recently occupied by the schoolmistress.  Miss Timpson’s trunks were there and the greater part of her belongings.  Mrs. Barnes did not stop to look at these.  She crossed the larger room and entered the little back bedroom.

The clouds were breaking and the light of the November sun shone in.  The little room was almost cheerful.  There were no sounds except those from without, the neigh of George Washington from his stall, the cackle of the hens, the hungry grunts of Patrick Henry, the pig, in his sty beside the kitchen.

Thankful looked and listened.  Then she made a careful examination of the room, but found nothing mysterious or out of the ordinary.  And yet there was a mystery there.  She had long since decided that her own experience in that room had been imagination, but now that conviction was shaken.  Miss Timpson must have heard something; she had heard something which frightened her into leaving the boarding-house she professed to like so well.  Ghost or no ghost, Miss Timpson had gone; and one more source of income upon which Mrs. Barnes had depended went with her.  Slowly, and with the feeling that not only this world but the next was conspiring to bring about the failure of her enterprise and the ruin of her plans and her hopes, Thankful descended the stairs to the kitchen and set about preparing breakfast.

CHAPTER XII

Mr. Caleb Hammond rose that Sunday morning with a partially developed attack of indigestion and a thoroughly developed “grouch.”  The indigestion was due to an injudicious partaking of light refreshment—­sandwiches, ice cream and sarsaparilla “tonic”—­at the club the previous evening.  Simeon Baker had paid for the refreshment, ordering the supplies sent in from Mr. Chris Badger’s store.  Simeon had received an unexpected high price for cranberries shipped to New York, and was in consequence “flush” and reckless.  He appeared at the club at nine-thirty, after most of its married members had departed for their homes and only a few of the younger set and one or two bachelors, like Mr. Hammond, remained, and announced that he was going to “blow the crowd.”  The crowd was quite willing to be blown and said so.