A sudden shriek—so long, so shrill, so blood-chilling that the hearers stand aghast—breaks out upon the still air. A second later it is followed by an imprecation and a rapid rush of feet, as Launce and Jack Delorme spring, with one impulse, toward the ruins.
Honor neither stirs nor cries out. She holds her brother's hand tightly in both her own, and prays in an incoherent fashion; and all the time a strange unreal feeling is creeping over her.
"Can these things be?" she is asking herself. "Are spirits allowed to come back and torture the living?"—for this fear is the keenest torture her vigorous young life has ever known.
It is all over in a few minutes, though it seems to her that they have been standing there a long time, and then her brother and Jack Delorme come up to them.
"By George, we nearly had the fellow!" Launce says panting. "Never saw a nearer shave than he had in my life! I could have sworn he was within reach of my fist; yet when I struck out, the brute was gone!"
He is flushed, excited, angry; Jack is cooler and graver. His face, as he bares his head to the light breeze, looks pale.
Honor divines instinctively that he, like herself, has seen something supernatural in this apparition.
But Launce scoffs at any such idea.
"It is some blackguard," he says scornfully, "got up on purpose to scare folks! He was within an ace of getting his skull broken for his pains."
Is it their overwrought fancy, or does a low mocking laugh float back to them?