"I think that there's not a doubt of it," he answered, stopping in his pounding. "But you need not think so, Miss Deb."
"How am I to help thinking so?" she simply asked.
"You needn't think either way until it is proved. As I suppose it must be, shortly. Let it rest till then."
"No, Mr. Jan, I differ from you. It is a question that ought to be sought out and probed; not left to rest. Does Sibylla know it?"
"Not she. Who'd tell her? Lionel won't, I know. It was for her sake that he bound me to silence."
"She ought to be told, Mr. Jan. She ought to leave her husband—I mean, Mr. Lionel—this very hour, and shut herself up until the doubt is settled."
"Where should she shut herself?" inquired Jan, opening his eyes. "In a convent? Law, Miss Deb! If somebody came and told me I had got two wives, should you say I ought to make a start for the nearest monastery? How would my patients get on?"
Rather metaphysical again. Miss Deb drew Jan back to plain details—to the histories of the various ghostly encounters. Jan talked and pounded; she sat on her hard seat and listened, her brain more perplexed than it could have been with any metaphysics known to science. Eleven o'clock disturbed them, and Miss Deborah started as if she had been shot.
"How could I keep you until this time!" she exclaimed. "And you scarcely in bed for some nights!"
"Never mind, Miss Deb," answered good-natured Jan. "It's all in the day's work."