“What did that woman ask me?” murmured Helen. “Was I afraid of ghosts?”
She laughed a little. To a healthy, normal, outdoor girl the supernatural had few terrors.
“It is a funny sound,” she admitted, hastily finished the drying process and then slipping into her nightrobe, kimono, and bed slippers.
All the time her ear seemed preternaturally attuned to that rising and waning sound without her chamber. It seemed to come toward the door, pass it, move lightly away, and then turn and repass again. It was a steady, regular——
Step—put; step—put; step—put——
And with it was the rustle of garments—or so it seemed. The girl grew momentarily more curious. The mystery of the strange sound certainly was puzzling.
“Who ever heard of a ghost with a wooden leg?” she thought, chuckling softly to herself. “And that is what it sounds like. No wonder the servants call this corridor ‘the ghost walk.’ Well, me for bed!”
She had already snapped out the electric light in the bathroom, and now hopped into bed, reaching up to pull the chain of the reading light as she did so. The top of one window was down half-way and the noise of the city at midnight reached her ear in a dull monotone.
Back here at the rear of the great mansion, street sounds were faint. In the distance, to the eastward, was the roar of a passing elevated train. An automobile horn hooted raucously.
But steadily, through all other sounds, as an accompaniment to them and to Helen Morrell’s own thoughts, was the continuous rustle in the corridor outside her door: