“Now we are coming to the real thing!” exclaimed light-hearted Blanche, clapping her hands gleefully.
“It might be, if I knew how to dress it up in fine words at awesome intervals; but I can’t. I can just tell you the simple truth—that, awakening in the middle of the night I saw, in the moonlight, as plainly as I see you now, the face and figure of Leander Jameson.”
“Good gracious!” cried Eunice, sitting bolt upright, and fixing upon old Dick a fascinated gaze.
“Of course, I had been thinking of him and his master when I fell asleep. Of course, it was an optical illusion,” added the old man. “I have said so to myself a dozen times since it happened.”
“What did you do? What did he do?” queried the listeners in unison.
They could not decide whether or not the General was trying to take them in. But all the same, the girls clutched at each other’s hands, and the young men essayed to put on an air of incredulous superiority as they waited for the climax.
“Frankly speaking,” said the hero of many fights with flesh and blood, “I pulled the clothes over my head. He executed the usual ‘vanishing act.’ When I looked again he was gone. The only occupant of the room beside myself was a rat that seemed to be dragging my boot across the boards of the floor.”
“Was the window open?”
“Wide,” said the General; “and, as it was the usual French window upon the ground floor of a bachelor’s wing, nothing could have been easier for a ghost than to step in and out over the sill. Next morning I examined the premises, but on the soft old green sward of a century that came close to the window outside found no trace of footsteps. The birds were singing in the very room with me; the warm sunshine bathed its every nook and corner. A young heifer, straying up, looked as if she meant to step over the threshold, but desisted. There was no trace or filament of visitation, supernatural or otherwise.”
“Naturally, since you dreamed it,” said Mr. Harry Lemist, convincingly.