“No, I can’t do that.  I can’t think of anything else.  It’s to bridge over the day that’s left before Seeing Ghosts.  If it does freeze, you’ll come to Mrs. Westangle’s afternoon tea on the pond?”

“I certainly shall.  How is it to be worked?”

“She’s to have her table on a platform, with runners, in a bower of evergreen boughs, and be pushed about, and the people are to skate up for the tea.  There are to be tea and chocolate, and two girls to pour, just as in real life.  It isn’t a very dazzling idea, but I thought it might do; and Mrs. Westangle is so good-natured.  Now, if the thermometer will do its part!”

“I am sure it will,” Verrian said, but a glance at the gray sky did not confirm him in his prophetic venture.  The snow was sodden under foot; a breath from the south stirred the pines to an Aeolian response and moved the stiff, dry leaves of the scrub-oaks.  A sapsucker was marking an accurate circle of dots round the throat of a tall young maple, and enjoying his work in a low, guttural soliloquy, seemingly, yet, dismayingly, suggestive of spring.

“It’s lovely, anyway,” she said, following his glance with an upward turn of her face.

“Yes, it’s beautiful.  I think this sort of winter day is about the best the whole year can do.  But I will sacrifice the chance of another like it to your skating-tea, Miss Shirley.”

He did not know why he should have made this speech to her, but apparently she did, and she said, “You’re always coming to my help, Mr. Verrian.”

“Don’t mention it!”

“I won’t, then,” she said, with a smile that showed her thin face at its thinnest and left her lip caught on her teeth till she brought it down voluntarily.  It was a small but full lip and pretty, and this trick of it had a fascination.  She added, gravely, “I don’t believe you will like my ice-tea.”

“I haven’t any active hostility to it.  You can’t always be striking twelve—­twelve midnight—­as you will be in Seeing Ghosts.  But your ice-tea will do very well for striking five.  I’m rather elaborate!”

“Not too elaborate to hide your real opinion.  I wonder what you do think of my own elaboration—­I mean of my scheme.”

“Yes?”

They had moved on, at his turning to walk with her, so as not to keep her standing in the snow, and now she said, looking over her shoulder at him, “I’ve decided that it won’t do to let the ghost have all the glory.  I don’t think it will be fair to let the people merely be scared, even when they’ve been warned that they’re to see a ghost and told it isn’t real.”

She seemed to refer the point to him, and he said, provisionally, “I don’t know what more they can ask.”

“They can ask questions.  I’m going to let each person speak to the ghost, if not scared dumb, and ask it just what they please; and I’m going to answer their questions if I can.”

“Won’t it be something of an intellectual strain?”