as THE ghost." And thereupon their invisible housemate had
finally dropped out of their references, which were numerous
enough to make them promptly unaware of the loss.

Now, as she stood on the hearth, the subject of their earlier
curiosity revived in her with a new sense of its meaning--a sense
gradually acquired through close daily contact with the scene of
the lurking mystery. It was the house itself, of course, that
possessed the ghost-seeing faculty, that communed visually but
secretly with its own past; and if one could only get into close
enough communion with the house, one might surprise its secret,
and acquire the ghost-sight on one's own account. Perhaps, in
his long solitary hours in this very room, where she never
trespassed till the afternoon, her husband HAD acquired it
already, and was silently carrying the dread weight of whatever
it had revealed to him. Mary was too well-versed in the code of
the spectral world not to know that one could not talk about the
ghosts one saw: to do so was almost as great a breach of good-
breeding as to name a lady in a club. But this explanation did
not really satisfy her. "What, after all, except for the fun of
the frisson," she reflected, "would he really care for any of
their old ghosts?" And thence she was thrown back once more on
the fundamental dilemma: the fact that one's greater or less
susceptibility to spectral influences had no particular bearing
on the case, since, when one DID see a ghost at Lyng, one did not
know it.

"Not till long afterward," Alida Stair had said. Well, supposing
Ned HAD seen one when they first came, and had known only within
the last week what had happened to him? More and more under the