He looked straight into her eyes.
“I have seen a ghost,” he said.
She was the last from being feminine in the foolish sense. She searched his face a moment; then, her own very white, seated herself on the music-stool, and looked up at him steadily.
“Whose?” she said.
“Ah!” he answered—“I thought perhaps you could tell me.”
“I!” she exclaimed.
“I had a reason for returning to the office to-night,” he said. “That was only a few minutes ago. As I mounted the stairs it seemed to me that something went beside me, and, when I paused, passed on and up. I was in a deep abstraction at the time, and—”
“The condition most favourable, they say, to ghost-seeing.”
“Yes, I can understand it—when the consciousness of externals falls away. I felt odd—vaguely, indescribably expectant of something; and, when I opened the door, it was there—the figure of a young woman.”
Her eyes never left his face; but her lips, though they moved, uttered no sound.