“Young man, you may have that chest, and the price is L50.  Now for heaven’s sake don’t offer me L40, or it will be L100 before you leave this room.”

“With the contents?” I said casually.

“Yes, with the contents.  It’s the contents I’m told you are to have.”

“Look here, Potts,” I said, exasperated, “what the devil do you mean?  There’s no one in this room except you and me, so who can have told you anything unless it was old Tom downstairs.”

“Tom,” he said with unutterable sarcasm, “Tom!  Perhaps you mean the mawkin that was put up to scare birds from the peas in the garden, for it has more in its head than Tom.  No one here?  Oh! what fools some men are.  Why, the place is thick with them.”

“Thick with whom?”

“Who? why, ghosts, of course, as you would call them in your ignorance.  Spirits of the dead I name them.  Beautiful enough, too, some of them.  Look at that one there,” and he lifted the lantern and pointed to a pile of old bed posts of Chippendale design.

“Good day, Potts,” I said hastily.

“Stop where you are,” repeated Potts.  “You don’t believe me yet, but when you are as old as I am you will remember my words and believe—­more than I do and see—­clearer than I do, because it’s in your soul, yes, the seed is in your soul, though as yet it is choked by the world, the flesh, and the devil.  Wait till your sins have brought you trouble; wait till the fires of trouble have burned the flesh away; wait till you have sought Light and found Light and live in Light, then you will believe; then you will see.”

All this he said very solemnly, and standing there in that dusky room surrounded by the wreck of things that once had been dear to dead men and women, waving the lantern in his hand and staring—­at what was he staring?—­really old Potts looked most impressive.  His twisted shape and ugly countenance became spiritual; he was one who had “found Light and lived in Light.”

“You won’t believe me,” he went on, “but I pass on to you what a woman has been telling me.  She’s a queer sort of woman; I never saw her like before, a foreigner and dark-hued with strange rich garments and something on her head.  There, that, that,” and he pointed through the dirty window-place to the crescent of a young moon which appeared in the sky.  “A fine figure of a woman,” he went on, “and oh! heaven, what eyes—­I never saw such eyes before.  Big and tender, something like those of the deer in the park yonder.  Proud, too, she is, one who has ruled, and a lady, though foreign.  Well, I never fell in love before, but I feel like it now, and so would you, young man, if you could see her, and so I think did someone else in his day.”

“What did she say to you?” I asked, for by now I was interested enough.  Who wouldn’t be when old Potts took to describing beautiful women?