“Because,” said Betty slowly, “I’ve got a curious feeling now that some day something else will happen, and I don’t want to be hedged in by promises to Frances, promises of not doing anything ‘foolhardy,’ as she would call it. Now that I have got over my fright, I feel as if I were braver than I was before! I think, if need were, I could almost make up my mind to speak to her, to the poor old thing, if I knew she were there!”
She fixed her dark eyes impressively on her sister as she spoke. But Eira shook her head.
“What are you doing that for?” asked Betty.
“Because,” replied Eira, “from what you say, from the feeling you have about it, I am more and more convinced that what I heard in the church was something real. You couldn’t possibly think of trying it again if you had felt what I did. I know I wouldn’t for worlds—not for a dozen Craig-Morions—risk meeting the ghost. And I am naturally both stronger and braver than you.”
Chapter Ten.
The Eyrie.
A tall girl was standing at the window of a drawing-room in a large house at the corner of a certain London square.
It was a good house, though with nothing very distinctive about it; one of the class that now, at the end of the nineteenth-century, people are beginning to look upon as somewhat old-fashioned. There was nothing “Queen Anne” about it, or its furniture; though, to make amends for this, it gave the impression of dignity and stateliness: perhaps, after all, the points that it is safest to aim at in a definitely town house, where light and height and air are the great desiderata. And there was nothing grim or gloomy in the colouring of the room, though a perhaps too studied avoidance of mere prettiness, which would, I fear, have been designated by its mistress as “tawdry frippery” or something analogous thereto.