“Yes, it will.  But it will be fun, too, a little, and it will help the thing to go off.  What do you think?”

“I think it’s fine.  Are you going to give it out, so that they can be studying up their questions?”

“No, their questions have got to be impromptu.  Or, at least, the first one has.  Of course, after the scheme has once been given away, the ghost-seers will be more or less prepared, and the ghost will have to stand it.”

“I think it’s great.  Are you going to let me have a chance with a question?”

“Are you going to see a ghost?”

“To be sure I am.  May I really ask it what I please?”

“If you’re honest.”

“Oh, I shall be honest—­”

He stopped breathlessly, but she did not seem called upon to supply any meaning for his abruptness.  “I’m awfully glad you like the idea,” she said, “I have had to think the whole thing out for myself, and I haven’t been quite certain that the question-asking wasn’t rather silly, or, at least, sillier than the rest.  Thank you so much, Mr. Verrian.”

“I’ve thought of my question,” he began again, as abruptly as he had stopped before.  “May I ask it now?”

Cries of laughter came up from the meadow below, and the voices seemed coming nearer.

“Oh, I mustn’t be seen!” Miss Shirley lamented.  “Oh, dear!  If I’m seen the whole thing is given away.  What shall I do?” She whirled about and ran down the road towards a path that entered the wood.

He ran after her.  “My question is, May I come to see you when you get back to town?”

“Yes, certainly.  But don’t come now!  You mustn’t be seen with me!  I’m not supposed to be in the house at all.”

If Verrian’s present mood had been more analytic, it might have occurred to him that the element of mystery which Miss Shirley seemed to cherish in regard to herself personally was something that she could dramatically apply with peculiar advantage to the phantasmal part she was to take in her projected entertainment.  But he was reduced from the exercise of his analytic powers to a passivity in which he was chiefly conscious of her pathetic fascination.  This seemed to emanate from her frail prettiness no less than from the sort of fearful daring with which she was pushing her whole enterprise through; it came as much from her undecided blondness—­from her dust-colored hair, for instance—­as from the entreating look of her pinched eyes, only just lighting their convalescent fires, and from the weakness that showed, with the grace, in her run through the wintry woods, where he watched her till the underbrush thickened behind her and hid her from him.  Altogether his impression was very complex, but he did not get so far even as the realization of this, in his mental turmoil, as he turned with a deep sigh and walked meditatively homeward through the incipient thaw.