“And how do you account for it? For I think it struck you even more than it did me. Horace asked me what we were both staring out at, but—I don’t quite know why—I turned the subject. I thought I would ask you first.”
“Horace,” said Frances hastily—“Mr Littlewood, I mean—knows that the Laurel Walk is said to be haunted,” but with these words she stopped again. Her hearer’s interest increased.
“Surely,” he said, “I must have heard something about it, but it is very vague. Who is our family ghost? And,” with some hesitation and a smile, “was it on its account—I don’t know what gender to use—that you seemed startled that evening?”
“Well, yes,” she acknowledged, replying only to his last question. “I suppose it was. I have never myself seen anything or heard anything of the ghost before, though Eira was once very frightened by some inexplicable sounds in—in church, in the family pew, which is supposed to be one of the limits of its wanderings. But,” she went on quickly, for she was anxious to avoid direct reference to the old story itself, “I cannot in any way account for what we saw that evening, and I believe in such cases the witness of two is very rare.”
“Did it look to you then like a human being?” he inquired. “To me it was almost too small for that, though it certainly seemed as if it were walking slowly along; not with any jerky movement, such as the reflection of a lamp being carried about, upstairs perhaps, might have thrown out into the darkness.”
Frances shook her head.
“No lamp could have produced the effect we saw,” she said. “I just can’t account for it by natural causes, though I am really not given to superstitious fancies.”
Mr Morion was silent, but still his gaze, as well as that of his companion, was fixed on the Laurel Walk, now almost dark. Suddenly the gate gave a little click, though no one was touching it. Both started, both gave a little laugh, and at that moment a gust of cold air, though till then the evening had been very still, if chilly, passed them with a sort of sobbing sigh, a sound that seemed to be wafted along the straight gloomy path in their direction. Involuntarily, Frances gave a little shiver, and she felt rather than saw that her sensation was not unshared by her companion.
He glanced at her.