CHAPTER XV.
A CHRISTMAS GHOST STORY THAT WAS NEVER TOLD.
It was quite dark in the corridor whereon opened the cloister offices. All the teachers had gone away for the holidays and the place was as ghostly as a deserted monastery.
“I can’t say I’d like to be here alone on a dark night, if it is such a young cloister. It seems to have been born old like some children,” Molly thought.
She coughed and the sound reverberated in the arched ceiling and came back to her an empty echo.
Pausing at Professor Green’s door, she stooped to shove the note underneath, when, to her surprise, the door opened at her touch and swung lightly back.
With an exclamation, Molly started back, leaving the note on the floor. Leaning against one of the deep silled windows, just where the fast fading light fell across his face, stood a tall, stoop-shouldered man. In the flashing glimpse Molly caught of him before she turned and fled, she noticed that he resembled an old gray eagle with a thin beak of a nose and a worn white face; and that his dark eyes were quite close together. The rest of him was lost in the black shadows of the room.
Once out of the ghostly corridor and the heavy oak door shut between her and the strange visitor in the Professor’s office, Molly paused and took a deep breath.
“In the name of goodness,” she cried, “what have I just seen? If he had stirred or blinked an eyelash or even appeared to breathe, I should at least have felt he was human.”
The big empty hall of the Quadrangle seemed a cheerful spot in comparison with the cloister corridor. It was warm and light and from the seniors’ parlor came the sound of piano playing. But Molly never paused to look in and see what belated student was cheering herself with music. Only her own sitting room with its gay holiday decorations and Judy twanging the guitar could recall her to a world of realities. Before she reached the door she had made up her mind that it would be just as well not to tell the excitable and impressionable Judy anything about the apparition or whatever it was in the Professor’s study. It was really an act of self-denial, because it would have been decidedly interesting to discuss the episode with Judy.
“I would have told Nance,” she thought. “She would have agreed with me, I am sure, that it couldn’t have been a ghost because, of course, there are no such things. But if I tell Judy, I know perfectly well she will persuade me it was a ghost and we’ll be frightened to death all night.”