and my son is in the house … Farewell! You had best leave me

quickly. See! She stands behind you, waiting. Go with her! Go now. .

.!”

The entire scene had vanished even before the final words were

uttered. Tim felt empty space about him. A vast, shadowy Figure bore

him through it as with mighty wings. He flew, he rushed, he remembered

nothing more—until he heard another voice and felt a heavy hand upon

his shoulder.

“Tim, you rascal! What are you doing in my study? And in the dark,

like this!”

He looked up into his father’s face without a word. He felt dazed.

The next minute his father had caught him up and kissed him.

“Ragamuffin! How did you guess I was coming back to-night?” He

shook him playfully and kissed his tumbling hair. “And you’ve been

asleep, too, into the bargain. Well—how’s everything at home—eh?

Jack’s coming back from school to-morrow, you know, and …”

Jack came home, indeed, the following day, and when the Easter

holidays were over, the governess stayed abroad and Tim went off to

adventures of another kind in the preparatory school for Wellington.

Life slipped rapidly along with him; he grew into a man; his mother and

his father died; Jack followed them within a little space; Tim

inherited, married, settled down into his great possessions—and

opened up the Other Wing. The dreams of imaginative boyhood all had

faded; perhaps he had merely put them away, or perhaps he had forgotten

them. At any rate, he never spoke of such things now, and when his

Irish wife mentioned her belief that the old country house possessed a

family ghost, even declaring that she had met an Eighteenth Century

figure of a man in the corridors, “an old, old man who bends down upon

a stick” —Tim only laughed and said: “That’s as it ought to be! And

if these awful land-taxes force us to sell some day, a respectable

ghost will increase the market value.”

But one night he woke and heard a tapping on the floor. He sat up

in bed and listened. There.was a chilly feeling down his back. Belief

had long since gone out of him; he felt uncannily afraid. The sound

came nearer and nearer; there were light footsteps with it. The door

opened—it opened a little wider, that is, for it already stood

ajar—and there upon the threshold stood a figure that it seemed he

knew. He saw the face as with all the vivid sharpness of reality. There

was a smile upon it, but a smile of warning and alarm. The arm was

raised. Tim saw the slender hand, lace falling down upon the long,

thin fingers, and in them, tightly gripped, a polished cane.

Shaking the cane twice to and fro in the air, the face thrust

forward, spoke certain words, and— vanished. But the words were

inaudible; for, though the lips distinctly moved, no sound,

apparently, came from them.

And Tim sprang out of bed. The room was full of darkness.