Ruth saw it. Only for a moment, but just as plain as plain could be! A white, fluttering figure—a sort of faceless figure with what seemed to be long garments fluttering about it.
Nobody ever has to see a ghost to know just what one looks like. People who see ghosts recognize their appearance by intuition. This was the garret ghost of the old Corner House, and Ruth was the first of the Kenway girls to see it.
She had made fun of Agnes’ belief in things supernatural, but she could not control the shaking of her own limbs now. It was visible up there at the garret window for only half a minute; yet Ruth knew it was no hallucination.
It disappeared with a jump. She did not wait to see if it came back again, but scurried across the street and in at the side gate, and so to the back porch, with scarcely a breath left in her body.
Ruth was just as scared as she could be.
[CHAPTER XI—IN THE GARRET]
It would never do to burst into the house and scare the younger girls. This thought halted Ruth Kenway, with her hand upon the knob of the outer door.
She waited, getting her breath back slowly, and recovering from the shock that had set every nerve in her body trembling. Of course she did not believe in ghosts! Then, why should she have been so frightened by the fluttering figure seen—for only half a minute, or so—in the garret window of the old Corner House?
Like the old lady in the fable, she did not believe in ghosts, but she was very much afraid of them!
“It’s quite ridiculous, I know,” Ruth told herself, “for a great big thing like me to shake and shiver over what I positively know is merely imagination. That was an old skirt—or a bag—or a cloak—or something, waving there at that window.