When it came, it was already lunch-time, but there was no evidence of hurry in her manner; there was, rather, an almost painful hesitation.  As she drew nearer, she raised her eyes to the house-front and I saw with what dread she approached it, and what courage it took for her to enter it at all.

The sight of my face at the window altered her expression, however, and she came quite cheerfully up the steps.  Careful to forestall Nixon in his duty, I opened the front door, and, drawing her into the room where I had been waiting, I blurted out my whole story before she could remove her hat.

“O Mrs. Packard,” I cried, “I have such good news for you.  The thing you feared hasn’t any meaning.  The house was never haunted; the shadows which have been seen here were the shadows of real beings.  There is a secret entrance to this house, and through it the old ladies next door, have come from time to time in search of their missing bonds, or else to frighten off all other people from the chance of finding them.  Shall I show you where the place is?”

Her face, when I began, had shown such changes I was startled; but by the time I had finished a sort of apathy had fallen across it and her voice sounded hollow as she cried:  “What are you telling me?  A secret entrance we knew nothing about and the Misses Quinlan using it to hunt about these halls at night!  Romantic, to be sure.  Yes, let me see the place.  It is very interesting and very inconvenient.  Will you tell Nixon, please, to have this passage closed?”

I felt a chill.  If it was interest she felt it was a very forced one.  She even paused to take off her hat.  But when I had drawn her through the library into the side hall, and shown her the great gap where the cabinet had stood, I thought she brightened a little and showed some of the curiosity I expected.  But it was very easily appeased, and before I could have made the thing clear to her she was back in the library, fingering her hat and listening, as it seemed to me, to everything but my voice.

I did not understand it.

Making one more effort I came up close to her and impetuously cried out: 

“Don’t you see what this does to the phantasm you professed to have seen yourself once in this very spot?  It proves it a myth, a product of your own imagination, something which it must certainly be impossible for you ever to fear again.  That is why I made the search which has ended in this discovery.  I wanted to rid you of your forebodings.  Do assure me that I have.  It will be such a comfort to me—­and how much more to the mayor!”

Her lack-luster eyes fell; her fingers closed on the hat whose feathers she had been trifling with, and, lifting it, she moved softly into the reception-room and from there into the hall and up the front stairs.  I stood aghast; she had not even heard what I had been saying.