“Would I do?” he urged again, with a kind of timid insistence.
My sympathies were with him. “You don't mind children?” I said. “We have two.”
“No,” he replied; “leastways, if they aren't very rough, I am not much frightened of them.”
“I guess,” I began, “that——” I was about to say that he would do, when my wife interrupted me.
“We do not want a ghost at all,” she said firmly.
“But, my dear——”
She raised her eyebrows at me, and I was silent. After looking from one to the other of us wistfully for a moment, the applicant turned and drifted away, vanishing dejectedly when he reached the gate.
“You heard what he said, Henry?” said my wife as he disappeared. “It is lucky that you have me by you! Do you want to saddle yourself with an American ghost? For my part, I will have an English ghost or none!”
I realized that Marian was right; but I felt sorry for the ghost.
“What did—the fellow—want?” roared Uncle Bain-bridge, who is deaf, and brings out his words two or three at a time.