“Perhaps you dropped it on the steps,” suggested one of the girls.
“If I did, it must have been trod on by many pairs of feet, then. Oh, dear, I am so sorry. Only this evening I said to myself, I must have the clasp to the necklace repaired. I had intended to take it to town next week to the jeweller’s.
“But I must not keep you up any longer. You were dear children to come up with me. Now go to bed and don’t think of it any more. I should not have been so selfish. You are all dead tired, I know, for I am myself.”
They turned and trooped downstairs again, and with softly spoken good-nights separated at their bedroom doors.
Billie and Mary were the last to enter the room they shared. They had stopped for a drink of ice water from a big glass pitcher, which had been placed with a tray of tumblers on a table at the far end of the hall. They were drinking their water silently, each absorbed in her own thoughts, when suddenly Mary grasped Billie’s hand and whispered:
“Look! On the steps!”
But Billie was looking with all her eyes before Mary had spoken.
A figure was gliding down the steps wrapped in a sheet. The stray ghost had evidently seen the girls at the same moment they had caught sight of it, for it finished the flight almost with a bound, and with a swift run disappeared through a door leading to a passage back of the steps, with Billie and Mary running behind. But the sheeted figure was too swift for them, and they heard one of the doors in the passage open and close softly just as they reached the entrance.
“It was this door,” said Mary.
“Or this one,” said Billie, pointing to the door of the room next the one Mary had chosen as the door the phantom had disappeared through.