Miss Gabriel, all the previous day, had been suffering from a sense of defeat, and at the hands of an enemy she had fallen into the habit of despising. A woman (or a man, for that matter) of Miss Gabriel's temper sees the world peopled with antagonists, and (perhaps fortunately for her amour propre) cannot see that her occasional victor is not only quite indifferent to his victory but has very possibly succeeded on the mere strength of not caring two pins about it, or even on the mere strength of not knowing that there was any fight going on. Such insouciance would have galled Miss Gabriel past endurance had it not, mercifully, lain outside her range of apprehension. As it was, she felt that the Commandant had taken her easily, at a disadvantage, and routed her—horse, foot, artillery, baggage.
And at the moment she had collapsed without a struggle. There lay the sting. She had meekly thrown up her hand, though it held one exceedingly strong trump. That woman in furs and diamonds.... Why had she not insisted on the existence of her own eyes and held her ground, demanding whence that woman came and what she did on Garrison Hill at such an hour?
The longer Miss Gabriel thought of it—and she thought of it all the next day—the more firmly she refused to believe herself the victim of an hallucination. She lived frugally; her nerves and digestion were alike in excellent order; in all her life she had never suffered from faintness, and but once or twice from a headache. The keenness of her eyesight was notorious, and she had a healthy contempt for anyone who believed in ghosts.... Moreover, Charlotte Pope, though inclined now to hedge about it, had undoubtedly seen the apparition.
"I wish, Elizabeth, you could find something else to talk about," pleaded Mrs. Pope, with a shiver. "You and I know everyone on the Islands and there's no one in the least like—like what we saw; while as for her jewels, they must have cost hundreds, if they were real."
"Ha!" exclaimed Miss Gabriel, with a decided sniff.
"I don't mean 'real' in that sense, Elizabeth; and I put it to you, Where could she have come from?"
Miss Gabriel could not answer this, nor did she try. "Then you did see her?" she was content to say.
"I—I thought I did."
"And I, Charlotte, am positive you did. Have you told your husband about it?"
"Not yet."