I nodded, and then, somehow, the story came out.
I gave him the letter, the little bit of cloth that had been left on my window-sill, and the notes that were signed E. J. He felt badly that I had borne it alone and called himself all sorts of names for taking it so lightly.
“Dear child,” he said, “why didn’t you show me these things before?”
“You said I was foolish, that there were no such things as ghosts,” I answered.
“There aren’t. Someone’s playing a joke on you. . . . And it will stop. I will see that it is stopped, and the person shall be punished.”
I told him his chin stuck out two inches farther when he was fierce, but he didn’t laugh at my joke.
“And you weren’t imagining when you told me that someone had felt for your bracelet when you fell from your horse on Riverside Drive?”
I said, “Of course not,” and quite indignantly. Then I began to see that they had all thought I was hysterical and silly and made up these tales from the creakings of floors and lost flashlights.
“I haven’t told them anything recently,” I said, “because they laughed. But the trap did catch someone, S. K. I did not mislay it afterward; I heard it snap, and that was the night this piece of cloth was torn from his or her clothes. And sometimes the bracelet comes back. It slides in----”
“How?” he asked.