“Absolutely not,” he said, gravely. “She is coming in my car. She doesn’t know to what house or whose. She knows none of you. She is a stranger to the city, and she will not even recognize the neighborhood.”
II
The butler wheeled out Mrs. Dane’s chair, as her companion did not dine with her on club nights, and led us to the drawing-room doors. There Sperry threw them, open, and we saw that the room had been completely metamorphosed.
Mrs. Dane’s drawing-room is generally rather painful. Kindly soul that she is, she has considered it necessary to preserve and exhibit there the many gifts of a long lifetime. Photographs long outgrown, onyx tables, a clutter of odd chairs and groups of discordant bric-a-brac usually make the progress of her chair through it a precarious and perilous matter. We paused in the doorway, startled.
The room had been dismantled. It opened before us, walls and chimney-piece bare, rugs gone from the floor, even curtains taken from the windows. To emphasize the change, in the center stood a common pine table, surrounded by seven plain chairs. All the lights were out save one, a corner bracket, which was screened with a red-paper shade.
She watched our faces with keen satisfaction. “Such a time I had doing it!” she said. “The servants, of course, think I have gone mad. All except Clara. I told her. She’s a sensible girl.”
Herbert chuckled.
“Very neat,” he said, “although a chair or two for the spooks would have been no more than hospitable. All right. Now bring on your ghosts.”
My wife, however, looked slightly displeased. “As a church-woman,” she said, “I really feel that it is positively impious to bring back the souls of the departed, before they are called from on High.”