Dori’s hold on her friend’s arm became tighter. “It’s coming this way! I’m just ever so sure that it is. Oh, Nann, why did we come to this dreadful place? What if that light came right up to this cottage and saw that it wasn’t boarded up and knew someone was here and——”
Nann chuckled. “Aren’t you getting rather mixed in your figures of speech?” she teased. “A lantern can’t see or know, but of course I understand that you mean the-well-er-person carrying the lantern. I suppose you will agree that it is a person, for ghosts don’t have to carry lanterns, you know.”
“How do you know so much about ghosts, since you say there are no such things?” Dori flared.
“Well, nothing can’t carry a lantern, can it?” was the unruffled reply. Then the two girls were silent, watching the light which seemed now and then to be held high as though whoever carried it paused at times to look about him and then continued to search on the rocks.
Slowly, slowly the light approached the row of boarded-up cabins. The girls crept from bed and knelt at the window on the seaward side. Nann, because she was interested, and Dori because she did not want to be left alone.
“Do you think it’s coming this far?” came the anxious whisper. Nann shook her head. “No,” she said, “it’s going back toward the point and so I’m going back to bed. I’m chilled through as it is.”
They were soon under the covers and when they again glanced toward the window the light had disappeared. “Seems to have been swallowed up,” Nann remarked.
“Maybe it’s fallen over the cliff. I almost hope that it has, and been swept out to sea.”
“Meaning the lantern, I suppose, or do you mean the carrier thereof?”
“Nann Sibbett, I don’t see how you can help being just as afraid of whatever it is, or, rather of whoever it is, as I am.”