“Ghosts?”

“Yes.”

“Have you brought me here to tell me a ghost story?” with an effort at lightness.  What misery the girl’s tones conveyed to his ears!

“The ghosts of things that ought to, and should, have been; are not those the most melancholy?” She pressed a button and flooded the hallway with light.

His keen eyes roving met nothing but signs of luxury.  She led him into the library and turned on the lights.  Not a servant anywhere in sight; the great house seemed absolutely empty.  Not even the usual cat or dog came romping inquisitively into the room.  The shelves of books stirred his sense of envy; what a den for a literary man to wander in!  There were beautiful marbles, splendid paintings, taste and refinement visible everywhere.

Warrington stood silently watching the girl as she took off her hat and carelessly tossed it on the reading-table.  The Russian sables were treated with like indifference.  The natural abundance of her hair amazed him; and what a figure, so elegant, rounded, and mature!  The girl, without noticing him, walked the length of the room and back several times.  Once or twice she made a gesture.  It was not addressed to him, but to some conflict going on in her mind.

He sat down on the edge of a chair and fell to twirling his hat, a sign that he was not perfectly at his ease.

“I am wondering where I shall begin,” she said.

Warrington turned down his coat-collar, and the action seemed to relieve him of the sense of awkwardness.

“Luxury!” she began, with a sweep of her hand which was full of majesty and despair.  “Why have I chosen you out of all the thousands?  Why should I believe that my story would interest you?  Well, little as I have seen of the world, I have learned that woman does not go to woman in cases such as mine is.”  And then pathetically:  “I know no woman to whom I might go.  Women are like daws; their sympathy comes but to peck.  Do you know what it is to be alone in a city?  The desert is not loneliness; it is only solitude.  True loneliness is to be found only in great communities.  To be without a single friend or confidant, when thousand of beings move about you; to pour your sorrows into cold, unfeeling ears; to seek sympathy in blind eyes—­that is loneliness.  That is the loneliness that causes the heart to break.”

Warrington’s eyes never left hers; he was fascinated.

“Luxury!” she repeated bitterly.  “Surrounding me with all a woman might desire—­paintings that charm the eye, books that charm the mind, music that charms the ear.  Money!”

“Philosophy in a girl!” thought Warrington.  His hat became motionless.

“It is all a lie, a lie!” The girl struck her hands together, impotent in her wrath.

It was done so naturally that Warrington, always the dramatist, made a mental note of the gesture.