guests as the scene of a supernatural incident.

Nobody believes in ghosts, but there is not one in a thousand of us who
would not be uncomfortable in a haunted house, or a house so reputed. If
Hewson told what he had seen, he would not only scatter St. John's
house-party to the four winds, but he would cast such a blight upon St.
Johnswort that it would never sell for a tenth of its cost.




III.


From that instant Hewson renounced his purpose, and he remained true to
this renunciation in spite of the behavior of St. John, which might well
have tempted him to a revenge in kind. No one seemed to have slept late
that morning; several of the ladies complained that they had not slept a
wink the whole night, and two or three of the men owned to having waked
early and not been able to hit it off again in a morning nap, though it
appeared that they were adepts in that sort of thing. The hour of their
vigils corresponded so nearly with that of Hewson's apparition that he
wondered if a mystical influence from it had not penetrated the whole
house. The adventitious facts were of such a nature that he controlled
with the greater difficulty the wish to explode upon an audience so aptly
prepared for it the prodigious incident which he was keeping in reserve;
but he did not yield even when St. John carefully led up to the point
through the sensation of his guests, by recounting the evidences of the
supposed visit of a burglar, and then made his effect by suddenly turning
upon Hewson, and saying with his broad guffaw: "And here you have the