“Maybe so.  But I’M not going home through the Bailey garden any more.  Here’s Jerry with a big string of trout and it’s my turn to cook them.  Jem and Jerry both say I’m the best cook in the Glen.  And Cornelia told me I could bring up this batch of cookies.  I all but dropped them when I saw Henry’s ghost.”

Jerry hooted when he heard the ghost story—­which Mary repeated as she fried the fish, touching it up a trifle or so, since Walter had gone to help Faith to set the table.  It made no impression on Jerry, but Faith and Una and Carl had been secretly much frightened, though they would never have given in to it.  It was all right as long as the others were with them in the valley:  but when the feast was over and the shadows fell they quaked with remembrance.  Jerry went up to Ingleside with the Blythes to see Jem about something, and Mary Vance went around that way home.  So Faith and Una and Carl had to go back to the manse alone.  They walked very close together and gave the old Bailey garden a wide berth.  They did not believe that it was haunted, of course, but they would not go near it for all that.

CHAPTER XXX.  THE GHOST ON THE DYKE

Somehow, Faith and Carl and Una could not shake off the hold which the story of Henry Warren’s ghost had taken upon their imaginations.  They had never believed in ghosts.  Ghost tales they had heard a-plenty—­Mary Vance had told some far more blood-curdling than this; but those tales were all of places and people and spooks far away and unknown.  After the first half-awful, half-pleasant thrill of awe and terror they thought of them no more.  But this story came home to them.  The old Bailey garden was almost at their very door—­almost in their beloved Rainbow Valley.  They had passed and repassed it constantly; they had hunted for flowers in it; they had made short cuts through it when they wished to go straight from the village to the valley.  But never again!  After the night when Mary Vance told them its gruesome tale they would not have gone through or near it on pain of death.  Death!  What was death compared to the unearthly possibility of falling into the clutches of Henry Warren’s grovelling ghost?

One warm July evening the three of them were sitting under the Tree Lovers, feeling a little lonely.  Nobody else had come near the valley that evening.  Jem Blythe was away in Charlottetown, writing on his entrance examinations.  Jerry and Walter Blythe were off for a sail on the harbour with old Captain Crawford.  Nan and Di and Rilla and Shirley had gone down the harbour road to visit Kenneth and Persis Ford, who had come with their parents for a flying visit to the little old House of Dreams.  Nan had asked Faith to go with them, but Faith had declined.  She would never have admitted it, but she felt a little secret jealousy of Persis Ford, concerning whose wonderful beauty and city glamour she had heard