“Not a bit of it,” answered Vibert; “Alice was as much in earnest as were all our servants when they gave us warning, because not one of them but plucky Susan would go to Myst Court. Why, I’d bet that Emmie herself is shivery-shakery at the idea of the house being haunted, and that she’ll not care to walk at night along the passages lest she should meet some tall figure in white.”
Emmie coloured, and looked so uncomfortable, that her uncle, who noticed her embarrassment, effected a diversion in her favour by giving a turn to the conversation.
“I have been tracing a parallel in my mind,” he observed, “between the human soul and the so-called haunted dwelling. Most persons have in the deepest recess of the spiritual man some secret chamber, where prejudice shuts out the light, where self-deception bricks up the door. Into this chamber the possessor himself in some cases never enters to search out and expel the besetting sin, which, unrecognized, perhaps lurks there in the darkness.”
“You speak of our hearts?” asked Emmie.
“I do,” replied her uncle. “It is my belief that not one person in ten thousand knows the ins and outs, the dark corners, the hidden chambers, of that which he bears in his own bosom.”
“Every Christian must,” said Bruce; “for every Christian is bound to practise the duty of self-examination.”
“I hope that you don’t call every one who does not practise it a heathen or a Turk,” cried Vibert. “All that dreadful hunting up of petty peccadilloes, and confessing a string of them at once, is, at least to my notion, only fit work for hermits and monks!”
“We are not talking about confession, but simply about self-knowledge,” observed the captain.
“Oh, where ignorance is bliss,” began Vibert gaily; but his brother cut short the misapplied quotation with the remark, “Ignorance of ourselves must be folly.”
Vibert took up again the comic paper which he had laid down, and pretended to re-examine the pictures. But for the captain’s presence the youth would have begun to whistle, to show how little he cared for Bruce’s implied rebuke; for, as Vibert had often told Emmie, he had no notion of being “put down” by his brother.