"Late hours, Mr. Ames!" she cried. "I supposed you had retired long ago."
I was still the least bit ruffled by that last transaction on the stair, and I demanded a little curtly:—
"Pardon my troubling you; but may I inquire, Miss Hollister, how long you have been sitting here?"
The clock on the stair began to strike twelve, and she listened composedly to a few of the deep-toned strokes before replying.
"Just half an hour. I thought some one knocked at my door about an hour ago. The lights were on and I came down, saw a magazine that had escaped my eye before, and here you find me."
"Some one knocked at your door?"
"I thought so. You know, the servants have an idea that the place is haunted, and I thought that if I sat here the ghost might take it upon himself to walk. I confess to a slight disappointment that it is only you who have appeared. I suppose it was n't you who knocked at my door?"
"No," I replied, laughing a little at her manner, "not unless it was you who switched off the lights as I was coming down from the fourth floor. I have been studying this chimney from the roof. I know something of the ways of electric switches, and they don't usually move of their own accord."
"Your coming to this house has been the greatest joy to me, Mr. Ames. I should not have imagined, in a chance look at you, that you were psychical, and yet such is clearly the fact. I assure you that I have not touched any switch since I left my room. It was unnecessary, as I found the lights on. And I acquit you of rapping, rapping at my chamber-door. It gives me the greatest satisfaction to assume that the house is haunted, and at any time you find the ghost, I beg that you will lose no time in presenting me. If the prowler is indeed one of King George's soldiers, hanged during the Revolution on the site of this house, I should like to have words with him. I have just been reading an article on the political corruption in Philadelphia in this magazine. It bears every evidence of truth, but if half of it is fiction I still feel that, as an American citizen, though denied the inalienable right of representation assured me in the Constitution, we owe that ghost an apology; for certainly nothing was gained by throwing off the British yoke, and that poor soldier died in a worthy cause."
She wore a remarkable lavender dressing-gown, and a night-cap such as I had never seen outside a museum. As she concluded her speech, spoken in that curious lilting tone which, from the beginning, had left me in doubt as to the seriousness of all her statements, she rose and, still clasping her magazine, made me a courtesy and was soon mounting the stair.