“Jane!” expostulated Don. “What do you mean?”
“I saw him—saw it,” said Jane nervously.
“Good Lord!” I exclaimed. “You did? When? Why didn’t you tell us?”
“I saw it last night.” She smiled faintly. “I didn’t want to add to these wild tales. I thought it was my imagination. I had been asleep—I fancy I was dreaming of ghosts anyway.”
“You saw it—” Don prompted.
“Outside my bedroom window. Some time in the middle of the night. The moon was out and the—the man was all white and shining, just as Willie says.”
“But your bedroom,” I protested. “Good Lord, your bedroom is on the upper floor.”
But Jane continued soberly, with a sudden queer hush to her voice, “It was standing in the air outside my window. I think it had been looking in. When I sat up—I think I had cried out, though none of you heard me evidently—when I sat up, it moved away; walked away. When I got to the window, there was nothing to see.” She smiled again. “I decided it was all part of my dream. This morning—well, I was afraid to tell you because I knew you’d laugh at me. So many girls down in Somerset have been imagining things like that.”
TO me, this was certainly a new light on the matter. I think that both Don and I, and certainly the police, had vaguely been of the opinion that some very human trickster was at the bottom of all this. Someone, criminal or otherwise, against whom our shotgun would be efficacious. But here was level-headed Jane telling us of a man standing in mid-air peering into her second-floor bedroom, and then walking away. No trickster could accomplish that.
“Ain’t we goin’?” Willie demanded. “I seen it, but it’ll be gone.”