"Come in and bring your lights," invited the old gentleman. "There are many kinds of ghosts, child. I will tell you who I am."
The four visitors crowded into the musty room. Phyllis and Madge had their eyes fixed on the girl's figure in the bed. She did not return their look, although the muscles of her face were twitching pathetically.
Miss Betsey Taylor was behaving very curiously. She held her dark lantern up so that its light fell full on the white face of the old man whom they had so rudely disturbed.
"Bless my soul!" she murmured out loud, "it can't be!"
"My name is John Randolph," explained the old gentleman, with a fine stateliness. "My grandchild and I have been living in this deserted house because we had no other home in the world."
"I knew it!" announced Miss Betsey. "Isn't it just like John Randolph! Would rather bury himself alive than let his friends take care of him. Southern pride!" sniffed Miss Betsey. "I call it Southern foolishness."
"Madam," answered Mr. Randolph coldly, "I have no friends. I can not see that I have done wrong to any one by hiding away in this old place, that was once the property of my friends. If people have thought of me as a ghost, and I have tried to encourage them in the idea, well, lives that are finished and have no place in the world are but ghosts of the unhappy past."
"Nonsense!" said Miss Betsey vigorously, her black eyes snapping, though she felt a curious lump in her throat. "You were always a sentimentalist, John Randolph. But you can't live on memories. You still are obliged to eat and to breathe God's fresh air. How do you do it?"
If the broken old man wondered why Miss Betsey Taylor took such an interest in his affairs, he was too courteous to show it.
"An old colored woman, 'Mammy Ellen,' who was a girl in our family when I was a young man, has not forgotten us. She brings us each day such food as she can procure. As for air"—the old man hesitated—"we do not go out in the daytime. I prefer that the people of the neighborhood should think of me as dead. But at night my little grand-daughter and I walk about over the old place."