The girl, having got her courage together, fluttered with it from her
place round to the ghost's in a haste that expressed a fear that it might
escape her if she delayed to put it to the test. The phantom was already
there, as if it had waited her in the curiosity that followed her. They
were taking each other seriously, the girl and the ghost, and if the
ghost had been a veridical phantom, in which she could have believed with
her whole soul, the girl could not have entreated it more earnestly, more
simply.

She bent forward, in her slim, tall figure, with her hands outstretched,
and with her tender voice breaking at times in her entreaty. "Oh, I
don't know how to begin," she said, quite as if she and the phantom were
alone together, and she had forgotten its supernatural awfulness in a
sense of its human quality. "But you will understand, won't you! You'll
think it very strange, and it is very unlike the others; but if I'm going
to be serious--"

The white figure stood motionless; but Verrian interpreted its quiet as a
kindly intelligence, and the girl made a fresh start in a note a little
more piteous than before. "It's about the--the truth. Do you think if
sometimes we don't tell it exactly, but we wish we had very, very much,
it will come round somehow the same as if we had told it?"

"I don't understand," the phantom answered. "Say it again--or
differently."

"Can our repentance undo it, or make the falsehood over into the truth?"

"Never!" the ghost answered, with a passion that thrilled to Verrian's
heart.