You can't imagine how it's broken me up in every direction."

"I--I'm afraid I can, St. John," Hewson began, but St. John cut him off.

"Oh, no, you can't. Look here!" He showed a handful of letters. "All from
people who had promised to stay with me, taking it back, since that
infernal interview of yours, or from people who hadn't answered before,
saying they can't come. Of course they make all sorts of civil excuses. I
shouldn't know what to do with these people if any of them came. There
isn't a servant left on the place, except the gardener who lives in his
own house, and the groom who sleeps in the stable. For the last three
days I've had to take my meals at that infernal inn where you got your
coffee."

"Is it so bad as that?" Hewson gasped.

"Yes, it is. It's so bad that sometimes I can't realize it. Do you
actually mean to tell me, Hewson that you saw a ghost in my house?"

"I never said a ghost. I said an apparition. I don't know what it was. It
may have been an optical delusion. I call it an apparition, because
that's the shortest way out. You know I'm not a spiritualist."

"Yes, that's the devil of it," said St. John. "That's the very thing that
makes people believe it _is_ a ghost. There isn't one of them that don't
say to himself and the other fellows that if a cool, clear-headed chap
like you saw something queer, it _must_ have been a ghost; and so they go
on knocking my house down in price till I don't believe it would fetch
fifteen hundred under the hammer to-morrow. It's simply ruin to me."