“And this is the window,” said Ruth, thoughtfully. “To the right of the chimney——Oh! goodness me, what a foolish mistake!”
“What’s the matter now?” asked the nervous Agnes, who did not dare approach very near the window.
“Why, it wasn’t this window at all,” Ruth said. “Don’t you see? It was to the right of the chimney from the outside! So it is on the left of the chimney up here. It is the other window.”
She marched around the big bulge of the chimney. Agnes held to her sleeve.
“I don’t care,” she said, faintly. “It was a ghost just the same——”
There was another window just like the one they had formerly looked at. Only, above the window frame was a narrow shelf on which lay a big, torn, home-made kite—the cloth it was covered with yellowed with age, and the string still fastened to it. In cleaning the garret, this kite had been so high up that none of them had lifted it down. Indeed, the string was fastened to a nail driven into a rafter, above.
Even now there was a draught of air sucking in around the loose window frame, and the kite rustled and wabbled on its perch. Ruth ran forward and knocked it off the shelf.
“Oh, oh!” shrieked Agnes.
The kite dangled and jumped right before the window in such a manner that it must have looked positively weird from the outside. It was more than half as tall as a man and its crazy motions might well be taken for a human figure, from a distance.
Suddenly the boisterous wind seized it again and jerked it back to its perch on the shelf. There it lay quivering, until the next gust of wind should make it perform its ghostly dance before the garret casement.