“And I haven’t even the right to half a question more!” Bushwick lamented, in a dramatized dejection, and crossed slowly back from the library to his place.

“Why, haven’t you got enough?” one of the men asked, amidst the gay clamor of the women.

The ghost was gone again, and its evanescence was discussed with ready wonder.  Another of the men went round to tempt his fate, and the phantom suddenly reappeared so near him that he got a laugh by his start of dismay.  “I forgot what I was going to ask, he faltered.

“I know what it was,” the apparition answered.  “You had better sell.”

“But they say it will go to a hundred!” the man protested.

“No back—­talk, Rogers!” Bushwick interposed.  “That was the understanding.

“But we didn’t understand,” one of the girls said, coming to the rescue, “that the ghost was going to answer questions that were not asked.  That would give us all away.”

“Then the only thing is for you to go and ask before it gets a chance to answer,” Bushwick said.

“Well, I will,” the girl returned.  And she swept round into the library, where she encountered the phantom with a little whoop as it started into sight before her.  “I’m not going to be scared out of it!” she said, defiantly.  “It’s simply this:  Did the person I suspect really take the ring.”

The answer came, “Look on the floor under your dressing-table!”

“Well, if I find it there,” the girl addressed the company, “I’m a spiritualist from this time forth.”  And she came back to her place, where she remained for some time explaining to those near how she had lately lost her ring and suspected her maid, whom she had dismissed.

Upon the whole, the effect was serious.  The women, having once started, needed no more urging.  One after another they confronted and questioned the oracle with increasing sincerity.

Miss Macroyd asked Verrian, “Hadn’t you better take your chance and stop this flow of fatuity, Mr. Verrian?”

“I’m afraid I should be fatuous, too,” he said.  “But you?”

“Oh, thank you, I don’t believe in ghosts, though this seems to be a very pretty one—­very graceful, I mean.  I suppose a graceful woman would be graceful even when a disembodied spirit.  I should think she would be getting a little tried with all this questioning; but perhaps we’re only reading the fatigue into her.  The ghost may be merely overdone.”

“It might easily be that,” Verrian assented.

“Oh, may I ask it something now?” a girl’s voice appealed to Bushwick.  It was the voice of that Miss Andrews who had spoken first, and first refused to question the ghost.  She was the youngest of Mrs. Westangle’s guests, and Verrian had liked her, with a sense of something precious in the prolongation of a child’s unconsciousness into the consciousness of girlhood which he found in her.  She was always likelier than not to say the thing