“But her head!” Brown ejaculated, “where was it?”
“Don’t ask me,” Reynolds replied, his teeth chattering. “She had no head. At least I didn’t see any. Dare you go on?”
“What, down there?” Brown said, nodding in the direction of the dip.
“Well, we must, if we are to get home to-night,” Reynolds retorted, “and I’m frozen.”
“Wait till that noise ceases, then,” Brown answered. “I can’t stand seeing a thing like that twice in one night.”
They stood still and listened, until the tapping gradually died away in the far distance, and the only sound to be heard was that of the water, the eternal, never ceasing, never varying sound of the water. Then they ran—ran as they had never run since long ago Rugby days—down through the inky darkness of the hollow and out—far out into the brightness of the great stretch of flat country beyond; and, all the time they ran, they neither looked to the right nor to the left, but always on the ground just ahead of them.
.......
For a week the horror of what they had seen was so great that neither of the two men could bear to be alone in the dark; and they kept a light in their respective rooms all night. Then a strange thing happened. Brown became infatuated, he did nothing but rave, all day, about the ghost. She had the prettiest figure, the whitest hands, the daintiest feet he had ever seen, and he was sure her face must be equally lovely. Why couldn’t he see it? There was nothing about the neck to show she had been decapitated, and yet the head was missing. Why?
He worried Reynolds to death about it, and he gave no one else any peace. That waist, those delicate white fingers, those rosy, almond-shaped nails, those scintillating shoe buckles! They got on his brain. They obsessed him. He was like a maniac.