her with a sudden smart rap of wonder, and she looked about her
down the dim, long room.

"Can it be the house?" she mused.

The room itself might have been full of secrets. They seemed to
be piling themselves up, as evening fell, like the layers and
layers of velvet shadow dropping from the low ceiling, the dusky
walls of books, the smoke-blurred sculpture of the hooded hearth.

"Why, of course--the house is haunted!" she reflected.

The ghost--Alida's imperceptible ghost--after figuring largely in
the banter of their first month or two at Lyng, had been
gradually discarded as too ineffectual for imaginative use. Mary
had, indeed, as became the tenant of a haunted house, made the
customary inquiries among her few rural neighbors, but, beyond a
vague, "They du say so, Ma'am," the villagers had nothing to
impart. The elusive specter had apparently never had sufficient
identity for a legend to crystallize about it, and after a time
the Boynes had laughingly set the matter down to their profit-
and-loss account, agreeing that Lyng was one of the few houses
good enough in itself to dispense with supernatural enhancements.

"And I suppose, poor, ineffectual demon, that's why it beats its
beautiful wings in vain in the void," Mary had laughingly
concluded.

"Or, rather," Ned answered, in the same strain, "why, amid so
much that's ghostly, it can never affirm its separate existence