Céline smiled again: "Mademoiselle dismissed me before she had finished her luncheon. I had disrobed her previously, and she said she should retire as soon as she drank her coffee. She may have forgotten the door."
Cora turned toward the bed. "Did you lock your door, Ellen?"
But Ellen did not know; she could not remember if she had or had not.
Then Cora said to Céline: "I am glad to find you so sensible. We shall have hard work now to convince those ridiculous servants that there is not a ghost in every corner."
"I do not think that graves open," replied the girl, seriously.
Then she gave her undivided attention to her mistress, who bade fair to be hysterical for the rest of the night.
Miss Arthur would not be left alone again. No argument could convince her that the specter was born of her imagination, and therefore not likely to return. So Cora bade Céline prepare to spend the remainder of the night in Miss Arthur's dressing room.
Accordingly, Céline withdrew to her own apartment, where her preparations were made as follows:
First, she shook out the folds of a sheet that hung over a chair, and restored it to its proper place on the bed. Then she removed from her dressing stand a box of white powder, and brushed away all traces of said powder from her garments and the floor. Next, she carefully hid away a key that had fallen to the floor and lay near the classically folded sheet. These things accomplished, she made a few additions to her toilet, extinguished the light, locked her door carefully, trying it afterward to make assurance doubly sure, and retraced her steps to relieve Cora, who was dutifully sitting by the spinster's bed, and beginning to shiver in her somewhat scanty drapery.
As the night wore on, and Miss Arthur became calmed and quiet, the girl lay back in the big dressing chair, gazing into the grate, and thinking. Her thoughts were sometimes of Claire, sometimes of Clarence; of the Girards, and of Edward Percy; then of her success as a ghostess, and at this she would almost laugh.