"And I suppose the country place was being put in order as a Summer residence?" the reporter asked.
"Yes. I had intended to make some repairs and changes there, and furnish it, but now I understand that a ghost has taken a hand in the matter and has delayed it. Have you heard much about this ghost story?" he asked, and there was a slight smile on his face.
"I have seen the ghost," Hatch answered.
"You have?" demanded the broker.
George Weston echoed the words and leaned forward, with a new interest in his eyes, to listen. Hatch told them what had happened in the haunted house--all of it. They listened with the keenest interest, one as eager as the other.
"By George!" exclaimed the broker, when Hatch had finished. "How do you account for it?"
"I don't," said Hatch, flatly. "I can offer no possible solution. I am not a child to be tricked by the ordinary illusion, nor am I of the temperament which imagines things, but I can offer no explanation of this."
"It must be a trick of some sort," said George Weston.
"I was positive of that," said Hatch, "but if it is a trick, it is the cleverest I ever saw."
The conversation drifted on to the old story of missing jewels and a tragedy in the house fifty years before. Now Hatch was asking questions by direction of The Thinking Machine; he himself hardly saw their purport, but he asked them.