"Hanged herself!" It was the kind of fable Mrs Ballard used to share with Adam Waggett's mother over their tea and shrimps. Frowning in horror and curiosity, I scanned his face. Was this the water I could dip for in his well? Alas, how familiar I was to become with the bucket.
He made a movement with his hands; at which I saw the poor creature up there in the darkness, suspended lifeless, poor, poor human, with head awry.
"Why?" I asked him, pondering childishly over this picture.
"It was mere gossip," he replied, "and true or not, such as 'they' make up to explain their own silly superstitions. Just thinking long enough and hard enough would soon invite an evil spirit into any old empty house. Human beings are no better than sheep, though they don't always see the dogs and shepherds that drive them."
"And does it," I faltered, glancing covertly up the walls, and conscious of a novel vein of interest in this strangely inexhaustible world, "does the evil spirit ever look out of the windows?"
He turned his face to me, smiling; and inquired if I had ever heard the phrase, "the eyelids of the dawn." "There's Night, too," he said.
"But whose spirit? Whose?" I persisted. "When I am here alone in the garden, why, it is just peace. How could that be, if an evil spirit haunted here?"
"Yes," he said, "but a selfish, solitary peace. Dead birds don't sing. Don't come when you can't get back; or the clouds are down."
"You are trying to frighten me," I said, in a louder voice. "And I have been too much alone for that. Of course things must look after themselves. Don't we? And you said an evil spirit. What is the good of dreaming when you are wide awake?"