“Now I can ask you to marry me,” he said; “and I love you, Irene, with my whole heart.”
Her first movement was an instinctive struggle to free herself; but the persuasion of his embrace was too sweet to be resisted, and she only protested by saying, “Your love seems to depend very much upon those detestable old diamonds.”
“Of course,” he answered. “Without them I am too poor to have any right to think of you.”
“Oh,” she cried out in sudden terror, “suppose that they are not there!”
The young man loosened his embrace in astonishment.
“Not there!” he repeated. “Fanny said that you had found them.”
“Not yet; only the ghost—”
“The ghost!” he echoed, in tones of mingled disappointment and chagrin. “Is that all there is to it?”
Irene felt that her golden love-dream was rudely shattered. She was aware that the lieutenant did not even believe in the existence of the wraith of the major, and although she had been conversing with the spirit for so long a time that very night, so great was the influence of her lover over her mind that she began at this moment to doubt the reality of the apparition herself.